A home for all our photos (and videos)

I’ve been looking for a permanent home for all our photos and videos for some time now. The requirement is pretty simple, I want to be sure we never lose our photos ever. I don’t think I could survive my wife’s wrath if I lose any of our personal data. And only yesterday I came across a video she made of when Arthur was born; well, there’s no way I want to lose that either!

I’ve been thinking about this for some time now, we currently use Windows Live Sync (Foldershare) to keep duplicate copies of our data on different machines, but the experience isn’t as smooth as it could be, and well, I wanted something a bit more transparent. I’ve considered Online Storage, as well as Windows Home Server, as well as just setting up a Linux box with a RAID card, but I think I’ve pretty much settled on getting a NAS device with redundant storage. I now have my sights set on the Buffalo 2.0TB LinkStation Pro Duo Network Attached Shared Storage. It has 2 terabyte disks which I’ll be configuring in a mirrored configuration, which means if a disk fails the data is still intact on the other one. It has some cool features like the ability to access your data over the web, and the ability to turn itself off when there are no clients on the network (and wake back up when another computer comes online).

Anyone out there use this or something similar?

5 comments

  1. What I do for my photos is this:

    I use rsync over ssh to upload the entire lot to my dedicated server. I have a 4 line shell script that does it all. It’s offsite, it’s simple, it doesn’t use any proprietary tools or storage methods that would be hard to recover, and it’s fast and easy to keep up to date given that rsync only copies things that have changed.

    Video is more problematical due to its size (raw DV is massive). But given I use a Mac for video editing, I just use Time Machine which is part of OS X.

  2. I use Live Sync, a Windows Home Server, and SyncBackPro (www.2brightsparks.com) for “local” backups and Carbonite for an offsite copy too… so far I don’t think I’ve lost anything…. but I’m still looking for other / better / cheaper / simpler options.

    I’ll be interested to see what solution you go for Owen – but I’d suggest going for at least 2!! 🙂

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