Central to the system is your own mini server – called a NAS. It’s small, compact and low powered so you can keep it running all the time.
We use Synology NAS units as they have a robust and mature operating system plus the right tools to allow you not only to easily back up photos, but also easily view them either on your computer or mobile/tablet at any time.
This technology was once only available for businesses, but it’s now easily affordable in the home.
Each NAS is set up with mirrored drives. Should one drive fail for whatever reason, you have a back-up. One of the great advantages of this technology is that we can simply replace a failed drive and the system will rebuild itself. We have chosen Seagate NAS drives to store your data. They are designed for this purpose and perform extremely well with a low failure rate.
Higher end units also take hourly snapshots of the system, so if you accidentally overwrite an image, it can be reversed.
You can arrange your images inside this folder as you choose. We can offer advice on different methods to file your photos for easier retrieval and viewing.
Once set up, your photos will be backed up each night online and when that process completes, you’ll receive an email confirming its success, or identifying any problems. After looking at many options for online backups, we decided on Amazon Drive. Amazon are the oldest provider of Cloud Storage and have multiple locations to store data safely and securely.
When you use this cloud-based service to back-up your photos, you have the confidence that there’s a copy saved offsite if something happens at your home (fire, theft etc). Should a disaster happen, we can help load up a new NAS and restore your photos to it.
And our system is completely private. Your photos from the NAS are backed up to a secure location which has no public accessibility. This means you and only you can view your photos, unlike other photo sharing sites or social media.
You can view your images anytime you choose, using your own computer or mobile device that accesses the inbuilt software on the NAS.
If you have captioned or changed file names on your photos it’s easy to search for them too!
You can also connect to social media sites like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter to share photos easily.