Even as a photographer the search for space is always present.

We take hundreds of thousands of photos each year to ensure you can store all those images in a safe and secure environment where you also cater for things like fire, and hard drive failures, the best friend you have is a NAS (Network Attached Storage).

For those that are not sure what NAS is, it is effectively a heap of hard drives that you would normally have in your computer, added together to create mass storage.  The other key with this type of mass storage is that you combine hard drives together and they appear as if they are one hard drive so you don’t have to worry about smaller hard drives to store large amounts of files.

The other great thing and the reason why you should invest in a NAS if you have not already, si they offer security over hard drive failure.

What I mean by this, is depending on how you configure your NAS you can have 1 or even 2 hard drives fail and all your data and files remain.  So all you do is buy a new drive put it in the NAS and away you go.

How cool is that!?

I have used NAS to store all my photos for years and here is the problem with a NAS.

As you fill up your drives you have to upgrade your hard drives to bigger ones, which is exactly what I have been doing over the last week. To be honest, has been a bit overdue but the cost of replacing l the drives has made me put it off for as long as I could. 

Now the new drives are in and I have a heap of space once again, it’s time to start filling them up with the idea that I won’t run out of space.

Oh, the other thing about the NAS I have, is that it automatically backs up to an off-site backup so if my building burns down, I will always have a copy of the photos and can retrieve and continue on with no only minor interruptions. 

win-win I say.