Backup storage solution for video/RAW photographs

Question

I work as a designer/photographer for a <10 person startup. We rely heavily on photography and video in our work. Currently we use Google Drive to store edited photos and graphics, however, have no single/unified storage system for our RAW and video files (ie we keep backups on our own drives).

What would be a good start to backing up/preserving our data? We produce ~10-50GB a week between videos and photos, and working between multiple personal computers, it can be a real hassle to upload and sync everything to Drive.

My current idea was to purchase a large external hard drive (5tb) to start.

Answer 1

Several ways to approach this. My input on this:

1. External hard drive - what I use now. I have about 3TB of photos from various events at my university. It's a 5TB drive and does the job. The issue here is that if it fails (and I hope it doesn't for a while), you will lose, if not everything, a lot of data. It's rather difficult to recover everything 100%.

2. NAS - If you have a fast network connection, this can be a solution. Store your RAW files remotely. If you're using Lightroom, you can generate smart previews and only mount the NAS when you need to sync/apply changes. The issue here is that not all NAS's have RAID, so again the problem of failure comes up.

3. RAID array - something like a Drobo comes to mind (or build your own). This is probably ideal because you will have redundancy, as well as increased storage and read/write speeds (depending on which type of RAID you use). This one can also be on the network.

Last I checked Avid has some pretty good network hardware for video backups. For hard drives I'd say Seagate, I'd avoid WD MyCloud (had one, it's slow). Drobo looks cool, but I've never used one. Hope this helps!