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NAS advice - setup for Windows & Mac? - Enquiries - 02-28-2020
Hi Robbie,
I have been watching your YT videos and I would like to ask you for your advice on data management.
I am a photographer and have 15TB of photos on multiple external drives. With the files getting bigger I add almost 5TB of photos to the collection each year. You can probably imagine that my Lightroom catalogue is a huge mess with all these drives.
So I was thinking of buying a NAS so that I can reorganise my LR catalogue and have all my photos organised on one device and keeping the external drives as a backup. I would like to process my photos in LR on the NAS (keeping the LR catalogue on my laptop)
I have always been working on a Windows desktop, but I have recently bought the Macbook Pro 13inch M1 laptop. My old computer is of no use to me anymore as it is not powerful enough to run the latest version of LR on it. So after having bought a new camera I can't proces my photos because I need the latest LR version for that. So I am a bit stuck at the moment.
My photos are on external drives NTFS format so my laptop wouldn't be able to work with them in LR.
Besides which NAS would be the right one for me I have questions like:
Is a NAS the best option for me?
Can I setup a NAS myself (I very much doubt it)
How to get my photos on the NAS and make them work for Windows and Apple? (in case I might switch back to Windows)
Will it be possible to process the photos in LR from a NAS?
Is a NAS easy to move...because I will probably move house a few times the next couple of years?
I have absolutely no computer programming skills and even the Macbook Pro is new to me and the first time that I work with Apple.
I hope you can help me.
Thanks in advance
Linda
NAS advice - setup for Windows & Mac? - ed - 02-18-2021
The beauty of the NAS is that it is the cross-platform friendly solution. All files are stored on a NAS and then translated into a network interface when you access the data.If your software supports network drives as a library then you can edit directly off the NAS. Otherwise, you can connect via ISCSI and trick the system that NAS is actually an internal drive.Moving NAS is easy. Simply connect to a new router and you are ready to go. If you work with a manual IP address then that would require changing.I would look at Qnap models with PCIe slot. This would be a good future proof solution.I hope this helps.