While I am perfectly content to work on my laptop out in the field, storing my LightRoom catalogue directly on my hard drive is not a sustainable long-term option. Sure, as a Mac user, all my files are backed up with Time Machine (and it has saved my bacon more than once), but these days, a single shoot can produce 2 to 5 Gigabytes of RAW files. I prefer to keep my modest 320GB hard drive well below 50% full, so I always have room to crunch HD video, and I don’t get stuck doing a day-long migration from backup if I have to rebuild the OS or upgrade my platform. Simply put, some things should be archived, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be easily accessible.

For several years, I have relied on direct-attached external hard drives (of increasingly larger capacities) for offline archiving of RAW files. At first, for direct-attached storage (DAS), I preferred Firewire drives, because they could be daisy-chained; but more recent entries in portable USB drives are offering a smaller footprint, single cable connectivity, and no external power supply clutter. I was burned early on by USB drives, and thought there might be something endemic to the format that made them inherently unreliable, but I’ve since outgrown that fear. Besides, massive external storage options are now so cheap that I no longer have any good excuses for not keeping two copies of everything on two separate physical volumes.

DAS is by far the cheapest and most scalable option -you just buy capacity as you need it. And if you stick to a simple calendar-based archive workflow, keeping the volumes straight is as simple as buying a labeler and slapping date stickers on them. The downside to using individual external drives is that backing them up is often a manual affair. Most of the backup solutions on the market today do an excellent job of mirroring your Operating System and anything on your built-in storage to an external volume (or volumes), but most don’t handle backing up externals to other externals very well. So you bite the bullet and make a point to synchronize your redundant copies every time you do anything that might change your images’ XMP sidecar files. This sort of thing will turn even the most meticulous and thoughtful photog into an obsessive compulsive basket case in short order.

What is needed instead is a massive, fault-tolerant, self-healing, fully-redundant storage solution that is accessible by all the hardware in your digital workflow. It should be scalable, so you can add storage as your business grows, and it would be nice if you could access it over the Internet. Enter Network-Attached Storage, or NAS.

I recently installed a Synology DS1511+ NAS in my local area network, and I’m just as pleased as punch with it. Besides dual gigabit ethernet ports (which can be run multiplexed), it sports four USBs (for more external storage or printer sharing), and two eSATA ports for connecting up to two extra 5-bay expansion units. populated with 3TB hard drives in RAID 5 configuration, that’s almost forty terabytes of storage! Holy cow! Now, I’m not going to push it quite that far… more likely, I’ll populate a full 5-bay chassis, and back the whole thing up to one of those 5-bay expansion units. For bullet-proof security, you can even back it up to another unit in another physical location over the ‘net -talk about belt, suspenders, and Kevlar underwear!

Anyway, besides just the massive amount of storage potential, the Synology also features a full suite of applications for serving up media files and granting clients passworded access to their photos (if that’s in your business model). The best part is, all of Synology’s products use the same OS and web-based interactivity, so they’re truly platform agnostic one-stop solutions.

Not too long ago, I would have considered this sort of thing to be best left to the IT pros and sysadmins of the world, but the user-friendliness is improving by leaps and bounds with each generation of NAS. So far, Synology seems to bridge the gap between consumer and professional SOHO storage needs the most elegantly. If you really want to take advantage of the remote accessibility features, and you don’t have a static IP address (cable/DSL anyone?) you may want to bone up on Dynamic DNS, and spend a few quality hours with your firewall’s instruction manual. It may be a little daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, administering your very own personal cloud storage empire will give you goose bumps. Then you can stop fretting about your files and get back to SHOOTING!