Synology Networked Accessed Server
My journey as a photographer and filmmaker has taken me on an incredible path over the past 18 years. I’ve witnessed civil unrest, extreme poverty and unspeakable violence but also surreal beauty and extraordinary acts of kindness.
I spend more than 300 days a year on the road, often in remote locations to share stories about people working to protect our planet for clients like National Geographic and a host of other publications and platforms. While the work can be dangerous and physically challenging, my biggest concerns are not what most people might expect. It’s actually the day to day management of data and imagery that causes the most stress. My life’s work is stored on hard drives in my home studio and as I add more and more video to my workflow, my storage needs keep growing exponentially. Because I’m on the road so much of the year, I need to be able to access it remotely.
Through the years, I’ve had to evolve from scanning film and storing those files on a huge variety of media, progressing through discs, cds, G-drives, drive towers, cloud services like photoshelter, and many others. You name it, I’ve tried it. Recently, I have moved everything over to a Networked Accessed Server. I use the DiskStation DS3617xs by Synology.
I can safely access my drives from remote places. It’s something I would recommend to photographers and videographers who are serious about having an organized storage and work flow and who are interested in having remote access to their files.
A NAS is a set of hard drives that I can also access as a server. Connecting to it as a server means I can log in remotely to grab a photo when an editor requests it or download or upload images as needed. I can continue to manage my business even when I’m far from home.
What was once four large hard drive towers that could only be accessed when I was home and physically connected is now a tidy black box that I can log into remotely. I have up to 144 TB of storage thanks to the 12 TB Seagate IronWolf drives I have in each of the 12 trays. It’s plenty of space for my life’s work and the work that I will continue to do in future years. In addition, I have a second NAS that lives off site and backs-up my main NAS every night, meaning I know that my backup will always reflect my ever evolving body of work.
Two more amazing things the Synology NAS system has to keep your archive safe. It employs the widely-adopted 3-2-1 data protection strategy to maintain multiple versions of backup data, providing extra protection in case the current version crashes due to unexpected accidents or gets infected by ransomware. A 3-2-1 data protection strategy means having at least three data copies, where one copy is stored locally, and the rest are stored on two different devices.
Additionally, it has Hyper Backup, providing an intuitive and integrated backup/restoration solution to help you retain/retrieve copies of your precious data and restore applications and system configurations to a previous point in time. It supports backing up data to local shared folders, external storage devices attached to your Synology NAS (e.g. USB), remote Synology NAS, file servers, and cloud services (Synology C2, Dropbox and Google Drive etc.) One thing special about Hyper Backup is that you get to encrypt your data before uploading to any cloud service.
Staying current with innovative technology makes my work flow and my business run smoother. This allows me to stay focussed on what really matters: the people and places who have entrusted me with telling their stories.
