As a photo manager I second your conclusion that NAS is too much maintenance overhead for most photographers needing more storage. Even ignoring the cabling and extra hardware, the task of managing a second computer device with configuration, upgrades, and maintenance adds a whole other layer of tech oversight. NAS solutions always sound really nifty, but the reality is less exciting. I have moved several photographers off of their NAS and back to a Direct Attached Storage setup and they prefer the experience. To be fair, I work in the Apple space and it's very easy to make DAS drives sharable to the entire network, so the main attraction of NAS - network-wide-access - is easy to mimic. PC's may not be as easy to configure. But, either way, I think NAS is really designed for more heavyweight network storage with IT oversight. Nice article!
I forgot about making a drive shareable. That's possible on Windows. I'm going to set that up for my map making folder on my main system. That solves one problem for me. Thanks!
To me, it seems like the people asking this question are mostly those in the “never delete “ crowd, and are basically suffering a self-inflicted wound that wouldn’t be an issue with a committed practice of trimming and culling. There’s nothing like the feeling of deleting 80% of what you shoot, keeping only the very best, knowing ghat your collection has a very high signal-to-noise ratio. I ended up writing a substack of my own on this topic.
As a new photographer, and having dealt with diy NAS solutions myself, glad I’m not the only one moving away from these. I’m currently using nvme ssd in enclosures as well as online backups that have served me well so far. Also using a network shareable drive with my Mac.
Thanks for detailing your experience. I’m suffering from a plethora of hard drives and redundant disorganized backups. Pretty good with recent stuff, but my early digital files are pretty iffy.
As a photo manager I second your conclusion that NAS is too much maintenance overhead for most photographers needing more storage. Even ignoring the cabling and extra hardware, the task of managing a second computer device with configuration, upgrades, and maintenance adds a whole other layer of tech oversight. NAS solutions always sound really nifty, but the reality is less exciting. I have moved several photographers off of their NAS and back to a Direct Attached Storage setup and they prefer the experience. To be fair, I work in the Apple space and it's very easy to make DAS drives sharable to the entire network, so the main attraction of NAS - network-wide-access - is easy to mimic. PC's may not be as easy to configure. But, either way, I think NAS is really designed for more heavyweight network storage with IT oversight. Nice article!
I forgot about making a drive shareable. That's possible on Windows. I'm going to set that up for my map making folder on my main system. That solves one problem for me. Thanks!
To me, it seems like the people asking this question are mostly those in the “never delete “ crowd, and are basically suffering a self-inflicted wound that wouldn’t be an issue with a committed practice of trimming and culling. There’s nothing like the feeling of deleting 80% of what you shoot, keeping only the very best, knowing ghat your collection has a very high signal-to-noise ratio. I ended up writing a substack of my own on this topic.
https://open.substack.com/pub/framespotting/p/the-minimalist-approach-to-managing?r=1g1p&utm_medium=ios
Great write up!
As a new photographer, and having dealt with diy NAS solutions myself, glad I’m not the only one moving away from these. I’m currently using nvme ssd in enclosures as well as online backups that have served me well so far. Also using a network shareable drive with my Mac.
Thanks for detailing your experience. I’m suffering from a plethora of hard drives and redundant disorganized backups. Pretty good with recent stuff, but my early digital files are pretty iffy.