External Drive or NAS?

[Clide]

I have a 3-2-1 backup system using external drives to store my photos. I use lightroom classic to import my photos, I upload photos 5-6 days a week, raw high-resolution photos. The external drives are close to full about 10TB and I have 5 TB of photos from 2 recent trips to work on. I need more storage. My options are to buy two large capacity WD Elements external drives and move the 10TB existing onto those drives and continue with my current set up, least expensive in cost and time. Problem is I am looking at the same problem 2to 3 years down the road. Two, bite the bullet and move to a NAS. My question for the group is moving to the NAS worth it in terms of cost and cost of set up time, change? I am looking at the raw power of QNAP vs the ease of use and finesse of Synology. To the Synology users has Synology move to proprietary use of their products been a problem for you? I know they eased that requirement in OCT 2025 but there are still issues. My third option is to sell everything and sit around and drive my wife crazy. Thank for your replies.

 

[iamdlewis]

Well option 3 does seem like the over most cost effective in the short term but in the long term paying for one house is cheaper than paying for 2.
Going to be a pain here and say that you can do both NAS and external. I have a Synology NAS and just because that is all I have I have no issues with any proprietary software and most people that are non-power user are probably in the same boat. I am at the point in which my initial set of drives are getting close to full. I am considering getting a 2nd 4-bay setup. The thought here is that one setup will be where the new stuff goes with redundant saving and the 2nd setup will be where one of the drives that has the older files goes.

Where the both comes into play is that the NAS only has RAW files, my externals have jpegs and other backup stuff. My 3 externals are not true backups as except for some document drives everything is manually backed up. I have the RAWs go to the NAS because those drives are much better to do work on than the externals are.

 

[Clide]

Well option 3 does seem like the over most cost effective in the short term but in the long term paying for one house is cheaper than paying for 2.
Going to be a pain here and say that you can do both NAS and external. I have a Synology NAS and just because that is all I have I have no issues with any proprietary software and most people that are non-power user are probably in the same boat. I am at the point in which my initial set of drives are getting close to full. I am considering getting a 2nd 4-bay setup. The thought here is that one setup will be where the new stuff goes with redundant saving and the 2nd setup will be where one of the drives that has the older files goes.

Where the both comes into play is that the NAS only has RAW files, my externals have jpegs and other backup stuff. My 3 externals are not true backups as except for some document drives everything is manually backed up. I have the RAWs go to the NAS because those drives are much better to do work on than the externals are.

David, thanks for the advice on the third option, you saved me a lot of money! Are you running 10Gbe, I ask because you said you work on the RAW files that are on the NAS. Interesting that you are saving jpegs and doc to the external drives. If you had more storage space on the NAS would you store everything there or are you using different storage for safety and backup? Thank you again for your advice.