Personal Cloud / Photography File Server

Hey guys, Not 100% sure if this is the best place to ask, but I'll give it a shot!

I shoot with the Sony A7RII, and am running 84mb per Photo. I'm currently sitting out about 43,000 photos (about 1.3TB). I've got all of this spread over 3 computers and 4 hard drives (It's a mess). Just last weekend, I sorted everything and made some logical catalogs. Then I uploaded the catalogs (with smart previews) to my Gdrive and have all cat's synced between the 3 computers. Basically I can edit any photo from any of my pc's and the changes should all Sync. Only issue being that I can't export a photo if it's sitting on another computer. Living in Switzerland, I will shortly be getting gigabit/gigabit fibre internet, and was thinking of making my own personal cloud.
Could some one please help me a little in figuring out a good option for storage of that 1.3TB, so that it's accessible from anywhere, and so that when I am at home, I have a super fast connection to my main working computer.
I was thinking of a 4-5 SSD raid setup with 2 spinny disks on the side as complete backups. Then 10gbit internal network.
Has anyone done anything like this before? And if so, could you please share your experience with me?

Any suggestions, slander, hate, love, help is greatly appreciated

Thank for your time guys!!
Ryan

 

If you've got gigabit internet, then I'd be looking at storing data in Amazon AWS S3 or similar. If you want to have a local cache, you could front-end it with storage gateway or something similar (there are probably other alternatives as well). Pretty cheap, probably cost you at most $10-20/month, which in a year would be cheaper than buying even one hard disk - and its infinitely more secure from a backup point of view as well.

 

Hey man, thanks for the reply!
I was thinking of the home based cloud so that my files are hooked up to my main editing computer, meaning infinitely faster access to them for more efficient full size editing. Disk speed seems to be a huge factor with lighten lightroom. I've not looked into amazon, don't most cloud servers charge per mb/gb downloaded?

 

2 things at play here

a) physical storage - it makes sense to have your data centrally stored rather than syncing multiple copies to multiple machines
So either a server (hosting the files), or a NAS unit with enough storage space to cover your requirements is the go.

b) Backups - then you can look to locally backup to USB drive or whatever

c) cloud backup/sync - plenty of vendors available for this, generally install the software on the server or a PC and it will backup your files to the cloud.
Most will then have a webclient so you can access from wherever.
Personally i'm using Carbonite as its unlimited storage for me. Upload speed isnt great so I just let it dribble out as required.

 

would be a fun project if you can fund it

if you're REALLY serious, look up freeNAS and OwnCloud (as a plugin)
possibly integrate Amazon Glacier/Backblaze as an off-site backup solution (while keeping at LEAST one local backup option)

happy hunting

 

Thanks guys for your replies

I think having the main working files locally is a must for me, as a standard sata SSD doesn't even cut it for full res photo editing (42mp uncompressed raw = ~85mb per photo). I have an HP mini server (gift from friend), which I will more than likely end up using as the basic backup. From there, I would be planning on making some form of SSD raid (M.2 raid connected to editing computer with Thunderbolt3 anyone? ) as the basic working drive. A far as 'offsite' or 'cloud' backups go (read that most cloud services charge per mb downloaded...), I would more than likely just get two 2.5" spinny disks attached to a Raspberry Pi, leave it at work and use that as my offsite backup.
I realise this all sounds quite over the top for a hobby Photographer..
Believe me when I say that Photography is my life line, and losing all that I have would be beyond devastating.

As for network infrastructure, I was thinking of using an old junker as a pfSense firewall/router, and then FreeNAS, or something along those lines for the actual storage itself.
Hopefully I can source some cheap second hand 10Gbe kit and run the internal wired network on that, as the TB3 thing could well be a pipedream

Again, thanks muchly for the replies, help and positive words!
Money permitting, I'll be trying to start this as soon as I can

Ryan

 

Don't know why you'd need 10gb local network. 85mb takes a second to transfer over gigabit ethernet.

 

hehehe, the day I come home with one photo, I'll agree with you
300-400 in the same session though, that benefits from a little bandwidth