People are always asking me if I keep their pictures so they can order more later if they would like to. My answer has always been, "well yes, but in this digital age it is hard to guarantee. In the days of film we always felt more comfortable with the negatives. But even then things could happen. Floods rolling through your storage or fire, etc. Today those same disasters can occur, but we've added hard drive crashes to the mix. I thought I had things well under control with two hard drives, one main and the other backup, a reflection of the first drive. Then one day I was searching for a client's photograph. She had passed away and her daughter wanted a print for the funeral. The good news is I found the file, but the bad news was I discover two drives had disappeared (I have 10 of them) and I hadn't realized it. I suspect since they contained older files I hadn't accessed the drives in quite a while so they just died. Machines are made to run, they don't like just sitting there! That set me on a quest to find something better. A friend told me about a system by a company called "Synology." They specialize in backup systems and you can buy their products on Amazon. (Large companies can buy their products through local outfits that provide backup services.) I bit the bullet and invested it their system along with four 8 Terabyte drives to get started. I configured it with Synology's hybrid raid. Their raid system allows a bad disk to be replaced. You simply take out the bad drive, put in a new one and the system automatically rebuilds the information on the new disk. The best thing about it is there is an alarm that goes off when there is a problem with the disk. The other nice thing about their hybrid raid system is that you can add larger disks at a later time and it works just fine. Now I'm feeling more confident that when I'm asked the question about will I keep someone's photographs so they can order later the answer will be yes!

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