First NAS for Overwhelmed Photographer

[SteelShadow]

I am an amatuer/professional photographer, but just barely.   I have been plagued by external and internal hard drive failures and I'm in need of a solution.

I have 7 years of photographs across two different operating systems and I need a clear and concise way to keep my photographs accessible and also organized. 
I am currently using a macbook pro (2023) to do all of my editing, and I'll be staying with mac, although from what I read about the web interface that's a non-issue. 

Right now I have 6 or 7 external drives, totaling about 8-10 terabytes storage.   I want to put the data from all of those onto 1 NAS.  
I don't know what kind of backup I need.  I certainly don't want my only drive to fail (again) but I am not capable of buying multiple drives for raid configuration, at least not in one go. 

I looked into building my own NAS, which is fine I've built my own computer before, but I'm stuck on what might be the best kind of bare bones with the ability to upgrade parts of it in a few months without starting from scratch again.  

I probably ingest 500 to 1000 gigabytes a year, so I'll need to factor in some overhead for a couple years until I can upgrade or add more drives.  

What kind of raid do you suggest I use?
Do you think I should just start buying parts to make my own or buy something off the shelf?

[whimsicaldonner]

I am an amatuer/professional photographer, but just barely.   I have been plagued by external and internal hard drive failures and I'm in need of a solution.

I have 7 years of photographs across two different operating systems and I need a clear and concise way to keep my photographs accessible and also organized. 
I am currently using a macbook pro (2023) to do all of my editing, and I'll be staying with mac, although from what I read about the web interface that's a non-issue. 

Right now I have 6 or 7 external drives, totaling about 8-10 terabytes storage.   I want to put the data from all of those onto 1 NAS.  
I don't know what kind of backup I need.  I certainly don't want my only drive to fail (again) but I am not capable of buying multiple drives for raid configuration, at least not in one go. 

I looked into building my own NAS, which is fine I've built my own computer before, but I'm stuck on what might be the best kind of bare bones with the ability to upgrade parts of it in a few months without starting from scratch again.  

geometry dash

I probably ingest 500 to 1000 gigabytes a year, so I'll need to factor in some overhead for a couple years until I can upgrade or add more drives.  

What kind of raid do you suggest I use?
Do you think I should just start buying parts to make my own or buy something off the shelf?

Start with a 2-bay NAS like the Synology DS224+, use a single large drive for now, and add a second later for redundancy (SHR or RAID 1). It’s easier than DIY, Mac-friendly, and expandable. Just remember RAID isn’t a backup—use cloud or external drives too.