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| 4 Bay D-Link / 5 Bay Drobo FS NAS Units |
As of this date, I have acquired 18,000+ digital photos from
various shoots, events, places and things. That’s not including the negatives
and slides that I have stored in negative/slide sheets hanging in file cabinets
in my office(I’m slowly getting around to scanning these slides and negatives
for digital storage).
Originally, I stored the digital files on an external, 1
terabyte Western Digital Passport hard drive and never gave a second thought to
the security of these files until….
One day while I was outside of my office, my son asked if he
could get a poster off my desk which I replied “Yes”, forgetting that I had the
external hard drive sitting on the poster, plugged in, and in operation. Later,
when I returned to my office to shut down my computers and the hard drive, I
noticed that the hard drive case was slightly open. Then it hit me. Did my son
accidentally drop the hard drive on the office floor while removing the poster
from underneath? Yes. Did the hard drive read/write head make contact with the
recording plates? Apparently not. Will I
be able to replace the photos that I have spent years acquiring? I doubt it. I
plugged the hard drive in and the blessings of God were with me again. Every
file was intact. Now that got me to thinking about how to secure my files so
that I would have access to them even after a catastrophic computer or hard
drive crash.
NAS (Network Access Storage) to the rescue.
I love gadgets, so I knew there had to be something out
there to handle catastrophic computer crashes and secure my files.
I started researching this thing called Network Access
Storage…NAS for short. A NAS is two or more drives set up in some form of RAID
(Redundant Array of Independent Disk). Without going in-depth into geek speak,
what this means is that every file is copied to two or more hard disk at the
same time. That way if Disk 1 malfunctions, you’ll still have access to the
same file(s) on Disk 2 or vice versa, provided both hard drives don’t crash at
the same time.
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| Western Digital 1 Terabyte Portable Hard Drive |
I’m now using 2 NAS systems to backup all of my photography
files. NAS system #1 is a D-link system with four - 2 Terabyte hard drives. I
back NAS system #1 to NAS system #2 which is a Drobo unit consisting of five –
2 Terabyte hard drives. These units can be accessed over the network or
wirelessly. The D-link even has it’s own web server, so it can be accessed from
anywhere around the world. I also keep a copy of the portable 1-Terabyte hard
drive in a safe deposit box off site. I
know that this seems like over kill but, if I were to lose any of my photos it
would be impossible to replace some of them. Better safe than sorry!!! Update(3/30/16)...all drives are now a minimum of 2-Terabytes including the portable WD Passport drive. We've also added and addition portable NAS, the Drobo mini. Read about it here.
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