BACK UP
YOUR PHOTOS

3 copies of every photo you care about
2 different kinds of storage (say SSD + NAS)
1 copy somewhere else (cloud, or a drive at another address)

My version: photos come off the card onto a working SSD, get archived to a NAS at home, and the NAS backs up every night to encrypted cloud storage. An extra drive that I keep unplugged is the fourth copy.

Three things that feel like backup and aren't

• RAID. Two drives mirroring each other protect you from one drive dying. They don't protect you from deleting a folder, ransomware, a fire or theft. Both copies go together.
• Sync. Dropbox, iCloud Drive and Synology Drive copy changes everywhere, including deletions. Delete a folder by accident and it's gone on every device.
• The memory card. Cards fail and get lost. A card is not a copy.

Before you spend anything, decide what's actually irreplaceable. For me it's raw files, edited masters and my catalog. Apps, previews and exports can be rebuilt; they don't need three copies.

1. Copy the card to your working drive with a fast card reader.
2. Let the copy reach a second place (the NAS, or a second drive) before you touch the card.
3. Only format the card in the camera, and only after two copies exist.

If your camera has two card slots, set it to write to both. That's a backup before you even leave the shoot.

Pick one structure and never change it. Dates sort themselves, and a place name makes searching easy:

Photos/
  2026/
    2026-06-14_paris/
      raw/
      masters/      ← full-res edited exports, the ones you print
      exports/      ← web and social sizes, rebuildable
  Catalog/          ← your Lightroom or Capture One catalog

• Keep the catalog backed up with the photos. Without it you lose every edit, rating and keyword.
• Keep rebuildable things (previews, web exports, cache) in clearly named folders, so you can leave them out of the cloud backup and save space.

Edit on fast local storage: your computer's internal drive or a portable SSD. Archive finished shoots to the NAS. The NAS is where photos live, not where today's edit runs.

A NAS is a small always-on box full of drives on your home network. I use a Synology. Use at least two drives in a redundant setup (Synology calls theirs SHR), and buy drives made for NAS use.

Lock it down before it holds anything

• Create your own admin account, then disable the built-in admin. It's the first name every bot tries.
• Turn on two-factor login and auto-block after a few failed attempts.
• Turn on the firewall. Allow your home network and your Tailscale network, nothing else.
• Turn off QuickConnect and don't forward any router ports. Nothing on the NAS should be reachable from the open internet.
• For access away from home, use Tailscale, a private network between your own devices. On the NAS, turn off key expiry or it will silently drop off your network after a few months.
• Turn on automatic security updates.

Snapshots

If the volume uses the Btrfs file system, turn on Snapshot Replication: frequent snapshots of folders you work in, daily for the rest, about a month of history. Snapshots are instant undo for mistakes. Immutable snapshots on your masters can't be deleted by anything for a set number of days, including ransomware.

The NAS protects you from a dead drive. The cloud copy protects you from fire, theft and ransomware. I use Synology's Hyper Backup sending to Backblaze B2, which charges by the terabyte per month. Check current pricing; it's usually far cheaper than consumer cloud plans at photo-library sizes.

1. In Backblaze, create a private bucket and an application key limited to that bucket.
2. On the NAS, install Hyper Backup and create a data backup task with B2 as the destination.
3. Choose folders on purpose: raw, masters, catalog, business files. Skip previews, caches and rebuildable exports.
4. Schedule it nightly, use Smart Recycle retention, and turn on client-side encryption.
5. Save the encryption key somewhere off the NAS: a password manager, plus a printed copy. Without it the backup can never be read, by anyone, including you.

The first upload of a big library can take days on a home connection. Start with the most irreplaceable folders.

A plain external drive you copy to once a month and then unplug. Ideally it lives somewhere other than your house (a studio, a family member's place). It's safe from ransomware because it isn't connected, and safe from account problems because no company holds it.

An untested backup is a belief, not a backup. Once your first cloud run finishes:

1. Pick a raw file and a master from an older shoot.
2. Restore them from the cloud to a different folder. Never restore over the original.
3. Open them. Check they look right.

Do the same from your offline drive. Repeat every few months, and after any change to the backup setup.

• Two-factor login on the NAS, your cloud storage account, and the email those accounts use.
• Cloud application keys limited to one bucket, so a leaked key can't touch anything else.
• The backup encryption key in a password manager and on paper, stored away from the NAS.

• Have the NAS email you when a backup fails or a drive reports problems, and actually read those emails.
• Glance at the last successful backup date once a month.
• Keep a spare NAS drive on hand. When one fails, replace it right away; the array has no protection while it's rebuilding.
• Keep at least 20 percent free space on the NAS.
• A small battery backup (UPS) lets the NAS shut down cleanly during a power cut instead of crashing.