1y ago

I have around 20TB of data, constantly growing & need access to it semi-regularly

Basically what the title says. I’m a photographer/videographer with around 20tb in separate HDD drives (currently backed up on Backblaze). I would like something that adds some security & gives me a central hub as my system is probably not feasible long term the more data I have. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

7 comments

I'm also a photographer and videographer (hobbyist, not professional) and I use unRAID for this, on a homebuilt server. It's been a reliable solution for over 15 years now. The great thing about this option is that you can incrementally upgrade it over time as needed. The downside is you do have to do some maintenance on it from time to time.
I also backup my RAW folders and Lightroom catalogs to some external hard drives as a secondary location.
For anything I want to share online, like portfolio pieces, I just use standard cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Backblaze is good too.
I also got a lifetime subscription to Zoolz a few years back and did a big backup to their 'cold storage' option. Works well as an offsite archive.

There’s an Amazon sale on a 4-bay Terramaster NAS for $170 right now. You can get that and whatever drives is enough storage space with whatever RAID you want, and then back that up to back blaze.
- And then if you want to access it remotely, get a cheap micro PC off eBay to use as a VPN server.
  
  Thank you! I’m still somewhat confused tho because I thought NAS implied I could access it remotely without any add-ons. Also for what I do, what RAID should I be getting? 0-1? Lastly, what drive brand do you recommend?

Get a Synology NAS. A 4 bay if you have money, avoid the one with ARM CPU, get one with an Intel CPU.
- I think all the + series are intel.

7 comments