The NAS Backup Workflow – How Pros Backup Photos (in 2023)

The complete guide to how we use a NAS backup workflow to protect our photos and videos, and what system we use.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Synology and Seagate provided us the NAS system and hard drives in order to improve our workflow and talk about our results with our audience. They did not pay us to promote them, and they have had no control or input over the content in this article. All thoughts, opinions and our new workflow are entirely our own.

Back in 2014 we bought ourselves a little point-and-shoot camera to document our most ambitious adventure to date: Travelling from Thailand to South Africa without flying.

We knew nothing about photography, but over the years it started to turn into a bit of a hobby of ours. From a hobby it turned into a passion, and soon enough from a passion into a job.

Fast forward to 2019 and we now work as professional travel photographers, and have over 50 terabytes of photos and videos from more than 70 countries in our digital media collection.

Over the years the need to keep this digital media safe has become an ever-growing concern for us, especially as we take on more and more clients who contract us for creating photos and videos.

Beyond the work aspect, these pictures and videos are also our memories of travel, holding moments in time where we’ve met incredible people, explored remarkable areas and achieved unbelievable feats.

To lose this would be tragic not just for our business, but for personal reasons as well.

But even though we realise just how valuable our digital media is, it isn’t until very recently that we actually established a proper workflow to back these up using a NAS backup system.

Today we want to share with you what we used to do, and what we do now, to professionally back up our photos and videos.

READ MORE – Check out our detailed guide for the best travel photography tips.

How We Backup Photos – From No Method to Pro Workflow

When we took our first trip to Antarctica in 2017, we captured over 2TB of photos and videos in 11 days. That’s a lot of footage.

There’s two reasons we took shot and filmed so much. The first was that it was Antarctica, a place so beautiful that words don’t do it justice.

The second is that it was a work trip, and we were trying to get the best content possible for our client. And as such this digital media was extremely important for all parties…