Replace NAS or cloud storage ?

[Arnovan Liessum]

Lightroom Version Number

LrC V9.3

Operating System

1. macOS 10.15 Catalina

Hello all,
I'm in doubt what to do, hopefully you can help me a bit.
My NAS storage (raid 1) is almost full, so I need to take some action.
The options are replacing the 2 hdd's for bigger ones (and possibly the nas as well), or by a plan on cloud-storage like Google One or OneDrive (I need 2 Tb).
What are the pros and cons regarding storage in the cloud?
Does it work with Lightroom, what about performance (I have about 88000 images)?
I understand that the cat file has to stay on the Mac.

Thanks in advance,
Arno

 

[clee01l]

A NAS does not offer anything special over an attached EHD. By your use of the " replacing the 2 hdd's for bigger ones"m do you have a RAID NAS? If so how is it configured? As far as LrC is concerned a NAS does not offer anything except a slower bandwidth to the image files.

Cloud storage is not (easily) constructed to work with LrC. Most cloud services (DropBox, Google Drive, MS OneDrive). require an equal amount of local storage. iCloud also requires some local storage. Renting a couple of TBs from these cloud services is not cheap and you can easily justify the cost of an EHD with a couple of years of cloud storage rental. The 1TB Adobe plan which includes the app subscription is $240/year or about 2X the price of a 1TB EHD.

What you have not mentioned is a system back up for all of your critical data. A RAID0/RAID1 NAS is not backup . In addition to storing your image files, you need a system backup strategy that includes a rapid recovery of earlier versions of individual file as well as rapid recovery of all of your data when that is a total disk failure.

A LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 3 6TB External Hard Drive Desktop is about $350.
For my master Lightroom configuration I only use TB3 EHDs. These are nearly as fast as an internal mounted Disk drives. My master image files are stored on that LaCie that is described above. I have two local backup EHDs and a TimeCapsule (NAS). I alternate Time Machine Backups between the Time Capsule and one of the EHDs, The Time Capsule has two disks (3TB and 5TB). For a third backup, I use the Acronis Backup app saving to an 8TB EHD. The reason that I stress backup is that most of the people arriving here on this forum for help don't have an adequate backup plan or any backup plan at all.

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

As a general response (Cletus has brought up some ambiguity in what you are doing):

Cloud storage, in my opinion, is not a substitute for local backup, but a supplement. You should have at least one offline (i.e. not continually mounted as a drive) backup that is local, versioned (able to roll back to a point in time) and regularly updated. Preferably more than one, but at least one.

In addition, you should have one off-site backup so that fire, flood, burglary, etc. will not risk both system and backup. Cloud backup is the most obvious candidate for that. These are last chance, all-else-fails backup.

Having your main system use raid is a nice reliability benefit but is not backup.

Having your backup use raid is a nice reliability benefit, but is probably the least useful place to use raid, since a failure here can always be rebuilt (absent the history of course) from the production system. Some people will use large raid-5 (or 6 or similar) arrays as a relatively inexpensive way to get more reliability in very large backups (raid 1 takes twice the storage, a 5 disk raid 5 takes only 25% more).

I have:

1) One nightly backup to a local NAS that is not mounted
2) Two EHD's that I back up to irregularly, with two different backup programs.
3) One cloud backup I back up to nightly with a different program than the NAS.

This gives me some redundancy of both storage, location and program. I also use raid-1 for my production system, but that's for reliability (and some performance) not for backup.

 

[PhilBurton]

Does anyone here use Drobo? Unlike other NAS systems, it can use drives of different sizes, with a proprietary data storage scheme.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Does anyone here use Drobo? Unlike other NAS systems, it can use drives of different sizes, with a proprietary data storage scheme.

I still use an old one as backup system. I don’t know about other and newer versions, but my Drobo is not a NAS. It’s a proprietary RAID system, but connected directly to a computer.

 

[PhilBurton]

I still use an old one as backup system. I don’t know about other and newer versions, but my Drobo is not a NAS. It’s a proprietary RAID system, but connected directly to a computer.

I realize that Drobo is non-standard. I have these no longer used 4 TB drives just sitting in a pile, and if I could pick up an inexpensive Drobo system on eBay, it would be worth it to me, provided that it is reasonably easy to manage and is reliable.

Ethernet or USB connection?

 

[dpirazzi]

We have a Synology 4 disk NAS that supports both backup and other purposes. Local data from our devices is backed up (copied) to the NAS, as well as occasional system images of each PC. In theory (!) the NAS can lose one drive and remain functional (no data loss) and will rebuild when the bad drive is replaced. With two simultaneous drives failures, I would need to replace drives and rebuild (from a separate local backup of the NAS that is done every night). Important data on the NAS is also continuously backed up to the BackBlaze B2 cloud via an app that runs on the NAS.

We also use the NAS to share files, and record and playback OTA programming on TVs and devices across the home.

My point in bringing this up is that a NAS can bring more to the table than just local or cloud storage in some environments.

 

[Arnovan Liessum]

Hi All,
Thanks for your replies.
I know that a nas also needs a backup, it's all taking care off.
But that was not the question.
Does LrC work with image files stored in the cloud, instead of local on a nas?
Has anyone tried this?

regards,
Arno

 

[Jim Wilde]

Does LrC work with image files stored in the cloud, instead of local on a nas?

No. LrClassic requires all image files to be stored locally.
Only the cloud-based Lightroom works with images in the cloud (but that's only Adobe's cloud of course).

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

Does LrC work with image files stored in the cloud, instead of local on a nas?

There's a slight twist to your question; many cloud storage systems emulate and cache to local disks. So for example, the Microsoft one-drive cloud stores copies of the files in c:\users\your-user-id\onedrive\ and has various options to either always cache all of them (updating to/from the cloud in real time), or to pull them down from the cloud on use (so access takes a while the first time).

These files are local to the program accessing them, but are synchronized to the cloud.

LR should be able to access images stored in clouds that work this way, because to LR (Classic) they are local. I tried it with OneDrive and it would add an image in my OneDrive folder, which is sync'd to MS's cloud, without any differences to a local file.

 

[Jim Wilde]

There's a slight twist to your question; many cloud storage systems emulate and cache to local disks. So for example, the Microsoft one-drive cloud stores copies of the files in c:\users\your-user-id\onedrive\ and has various options to either always cache all of them (updating to/from the cloud in real time), or to pull them down from the cloud on use (so access takes a while the first time).

These files are local to the program accessing them, but are synchronized to the cloud.

LR should be able to access images stored in clouds that work this way, because to LR (Classic) they are local. I tried it with OneDrive and it would add an image in my OneDrive folder, which is sync'd to MS's cloud, without any differences to a local file.

Sure, but that would defeat the whole point of the OP's initial post, the essence of which was "can I free up local storage by putting my images in the cloud and have LR access them from that cloud". The answer to that question is "No".

 

[LouieSherwin]

Does your Mac have Thunderbolt 2 or3 port? If so you might want to consider making the jump to a more flexible 4 bay Thunderbolt enclosure. It will consolidate multiple dries into one box and minimize cables and power. You want something that supports hot swapping drives and JBOD (Just a bunch of disks). LIghtroom has always worked with multiple hard drives thus eliminating the need for large capacity RAID volume.

Unless you are going to be editing feature length movies you do not need any of the advantages or headaches of setting up managing a RAID system. Sure there a benchmarks out there that show improved speed in Lightroom when accessing a RAID but in practice you are more limited by the CPU and memory.

-louie

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

Sure, but that would defeat the whole point of the OP's initial post, the essence of which was "can I free up local storage by putting my images in the cloud and have LR access them from that cloud". The answer to that question is "No".

Well, except that some let you control which files are cached locally, and synch-on-demand. In one-drive for example you can have different settings by folder, so if folders are date related, you could keep newer folders cached locally and older ones accessed live from the cloud (slowly).

I think it's a bad solution, but just trying to answer the question emphasized.

 

[clee01l]

Sure, but that would defeat the whole point of the OP's initial post, the essence of which was "can I free up local storage by putting my images in the cloud and have LR access them from that cloud". The answer to that question is "No".

Which I thought I covered earlier: “Cloud storage is not (easily) constructed to work with LrC. Most cloud services (DropBox, Google Drive, MS OneDrive). require an equal amount of local storage. iCloud also requires some local storage. Renting a couple of TBs from these cloud services is not cheap and you can easily justify the cost of an EHD with a couple of years of cloud storage rental.”


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