Please take a look at my problems and plan to solve them... I want to know from people with experience if this is going to work / what problems I will face and what I haven't considered yet, please.
Sorry, it's long (Thought dump!), I've tried to make sections but there are so many thoughts in my head about all this, and googling is making it worse!
The basic question is:
I think I need to upgrade my NAS (MyCloud home) in order to be able to effectively manage my photos/video and make life easier for me and my wife. So what NAS should I be going for, as it is a lot of spend, but I think worth it, for the right solution.
My research is pointing me toward Synology "+" Range, DS720/920 but will it do what I want/need?
Background
We have appox 3-4tb of photos/videos/files from that past 15 - 20 years in digital form. 100k+ items. 1 year ago this was about 1-1.5tb. We since having your first child we are taking a lot of 4k videos + go pro videos etc. These have been saved over multiple devices over the years, laptops/phones/HDD/Cds/DVDs. In many cases, stuff has been duplicated. I.e saved on wifes laptop + mine, then moved to a HDD, when laptops died. Luckily since living together etc, we are a bit more centralized than before.
We both currently use Google Photos (high quality, free) and NAS to back up photos from our phones - google is coming to an end in June. (free at least)
Current Solution
Just over a year ago we brought a MyCloud Home 4TB - this would be our central repository and back up our phone photos/videos. Also combine all the various storage mediums we had. Plan was to back this up to an external HDD regularly. - but my 2TB has run out of space and is slow.
- Phones Photos - Backup to Google Photos + MyCloud Home.
- GoPro/Other Cameras - SDs copied to the laptop, backed up to google photos, then transferred to NAS
- Video Editing - for this I file from NAS to Laptop (NVME SSD) and edit on there using resolve, can be slow process, especially the initial copy of 20-40gb of files, which I then create proxies of to edit.
Proposed Solution + questions
- New "More powerful" NAS
- Synology DS920+ / DS720+ / DS420+ I am trying to work out which is best for us.
- QNAP also seems interesting.
- Currently, I am edging towards 920+/720+
- Drives - What Size / How set up?
- I want to have something in Raid for speed/drive failures
- Trying to understand some of this - Raid2/mirror is obvious, Raid 5 is confusing me
- Drives? X2 8tb Iron Wolfs or X4 4tb? - either comes to £350-380ish
- if I go x2 8tb to start, fill the 8tb (raid 2) and then add another 8tb, what would my storage be in different raids / What's possible? (in simplest terms please )
- Use Synology Photos to create Albums, Facial Recognition, tagging
- does this affect photos metadata? i.e if I tag is this only in Synology or on the file?
- Can you create albums where photos can be in a central annual folder "2020" and then in say "Birthday Album", and "Pretty Pictures of My Child to Share with Family Album"?
- Same with videos
- Also, can this be used to delete photos from the NAS? - what if someone accidentally deletes something?
- What is the mobile app like?
- Automatically backup phone photos
- How does this work with Synology? can you specify a folder? i.e "YYYY" or does it do like MyCloud Home and produce a folder for each device?
- Other considerations / questions
- I am also wondering what else I can do with a NAS, I have seen IP Cameras, we currently have a baby camera EZVIS, which is good but drops out, would be interested if could use NAS for this with Baby2 on the way. + security for our home.
- Media Server - we don't really have much media now, thank netflix/spotify, but would want to see home videos on TV from time to time. Maybe via Xbox One X / Samsung TV?
- Retro console, I do use emulators etc on phone/pc. Is it possible to store this info on NAS? to be the same across devices (like a cloud save?) - I have even seen NAS's running it. :-S
- Someone mentioned to be you can attach a graphics card to a NAS/Server to run programs? not sure how true this is. Mainly wondering about running Zwift (cycling app) to a monitor in bike room, rather than lugging laptop in each time.
- Virtual Machines, I use these at work all time, trying to understand how works on a NAS.
- Anything a NAS can do I might be missing out on / should consider?
- Merge in Google Photos / Remove Duplicates
- Not sure about this yet - but see problems below - we believe we have gaps where photos were only backed up to google photos, but don't know when. So like to download whole lot and merge only keeping Orginals on NAS or missing from google photos. Not sure if this can be automated or is a manual "EEK" job.
What We Want to Achieve
- Central Storage (NAS) - can be backed up to a HDD to be kept offsite
- Fast Access - 4k h.265 videos
- Ideally the ability to used files for video editing (laptop) (this might be with some proxies)
- Some form of raid to protect again disk failure
- Ability to View/Edit photos/video from anywhere.
- place these in albums, add tags, use facial and object recognition. View by date, Album, person, search etc. -
- this will be our 100k photos/videos direct from our NAS
- This should be available on Laptop / Phone on our home network and from outside.
- Quick trim of Videos without metadata loss
- I.e cut a 5min video to the 1min of interesting stuff that happened, deleting the junk, but not losing metadata - i.e when/where recorded.
- Easily Increase Storage
- Able to relocated photos/videos on the NAS + remove duplicates.
Problems (current solution)
- MyCloudHome - this is nearly full.
- We seem to have produced 2tb of videos/pictures in just over a year. However I am wondering if some of this is duplicated and stuff we can delete...
- Managing Photos/Videos -
- there are duplicates on my NAS, some with wrong dates / lower qualities. I have been trying to sort our photos into folders. Some are easy enough, but there is a lot causing nightmares. MCH offers a very limited photos viewer and does not support H.265 videos.
- Using windows photos / digicam and trying to get it to read from NAS is a nightmare, on top of which it now gives itself a new drive letter regularly.
- Mobile access
- my wife wants to be able to browse our catalogue of photos / videos, delete, tag, sort to albumns (like google) from her phone, (Samsung S10), now while google photos supports this currently, its annoying as we have an account each, we are planning to drop photos after June, as we would rather have our media in our own possession
- Google Photos - Our phones backup to google and NAS. We used to copy the photos to a HDD before the NAS. But we also had a period where I think my wife only used google photos.
- I do not know when this was, but it also means these photos only exist on google currently! :-|
What Works (current solution)
- NAS Back up - we love just knowing our photos/videos are backing up to the NAS, can delete from phones once you see the green tick.
- Centralized Storage, we like the access to a single point NAS, on our network or outside, although the painfully slowness of this NAS means we do not sure it
- Google Photos Albums - we love being able to have 1 photo in multiple albums, and being able to share those with family/friends etc.
Submitted by CyclingDad88 | #Specialdealer Special Offer Online Shopping Store 2016
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