One of the most challenging things I deal with is the secure storage of my images. Well...I call them my images, but they are also the images for my clients, and I hate having them in only one place. This keeps me up at night.
In the past week I was crazy busy with photo shoots for a government client, another institution, and 2 personal events. After all of this, I had just enough time to get all 10,000 images onto my MacBook Pro before heading to the airport on Sunday morning. Just in case something happened to my laptop in transport, I duplicated all those RAW files onto a SSD back in California before heading out.
I then spent the 9 hours of travel going through all the images and purging the duplicates and rejects, and ranking the good ones. I renamed all the files, retouched my favorites and got each gallery ready to post to my clients. I posted one event from the airport in Houston and the remainder from here in Costa Rica.
BUT at this point I had all the curated images only on my laptop and that makes me nervous. In the past, I would back them up on one of my Crucial 4TB SSDs and keep that SSD in a different bag from my laptop as I traveled, but was not ideal. I also tried uploading to my NAS drive directly through the web app but every time there was a disconnect from the Internet, or I had to close my laptop to move it, the synch would have to start over and that was impossible.
A couple of months ago I was watching an online presentation from QNAP and they mentioned something about Dropbox integration and this peaked my interest. I was thinking "Can I create a Dropbox folder and have it automatically uploaded to my NAS drives back in California?"
I reached out to the support people at QNAP and they were nice enough to help me set this up and, even though I am jumping ahead of things, it works amazing!!
Using the Hybrid Backup Sync application from QNAP, I was able to create a link to my Dropbox account.
I then told the HBS app which folder to monitor.
I let the computer run all night while I attempted to catch up on some much needed sleep. When I woke up in the morning, I saw that there were only a few more files remaining to upload to Dropbox. After a quick shower I checked again and the process was complete.
At this point, I was happy to have them in the cloud but wanted to check and see if they really had made it to my NAS drive. I used the MyQNAPCloud web link to log into my server from this remote location.
I was happy to see that both of the new folders had transferred over..
I then opened the folders to make sure that the synch had happened correctly and that everything is in place, and as expected, all 65GB of images are safe and sound! I guess this means that the images are in 4 places right now. They are on my MacBook Pro, Dropbox (for now), my server and my backup server. Sweet!
I am really excited about this newfound data transfer method and look forward to using it for future trips and even from here in Costa Rica this week for all my favorite photos. And thanks to the support people at QNAP for helping me get this set up.
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