NAS

Organizing Digitally – Photos

On the surface, it seems a little goofy to separate Photos from Videos, but the reality is, both of these formats really deserve separate handling. For one, when backing up Photos, a lot of solutions will give you unlimited photo storage, but not unlimited video storage. Which makes automatic backup tricky.

Video is also rather massive compared to photos, from a file size perspective. A side effect of this is that having videos mixed with photos can dramatically increase load times when browsing photos later, since it takes more for the file system to chug through a video for thumbnails etc.

I have effectively two sorting systems for photos, depending on what the photos are. Also, unlike the videos, my wife does a lot of the actual sorting of Photos, at least the family photos, since she uses them for scrapbooks and such.

Family Photos

Similar to videos, I sort family photos by year, in one large blob. The difference is, I also sort them into folders by “event”. For example, there might be a folder, “2019.12.25 – Christmas at Home”. The extra details are helpful, because there might also be, “2019.12.23 – Christmas at Josh’s Parents” and “2019.12.26 – Christmas at Tina’s Parents”. (NOTE: I use the actual names of our parents). One minor mistake I made early on when I was doing all the sorting, was labeling them things like “Christmas at My Parents”. I changed all of those to be my parent’s names. I might also use “Christmas at Home with Josh’s Family”.

These folder names allow for easy sorting by date, and it allows a quick, at a glance description of who might be in the photos. I have tried several different Photo Organizing software solutions, and frankly, nothing beats just using the straight file system folders. The nice thing is a lot of software solutions will use the Folders as a way or sorting, so using these folders means the photos can easily and quickly be imported.

Each year also may have some more generic folders. These are catch all folders such as “2018 Cat Photos” or “2012 Kids School Artwork”. There might also be folders like “2014 Misc”, which is where less eventful photos might go. This would be things like, 1-2 lone photos at a local fair event, or single photos of weather or something at the house. They don’t deserve an entire folder, but they are still in the correct year.

Other Photos

I labeled this as “other photos” but it’s mostly just my photos. I take a lot of random photos of my toys and electronics projects, and random crap that is mostly unimportant. I keep these photos separate from the Family Photos, mostly because it’s just clutter my wife doesn’t care about, but because they are just different in their core nature.

These are sorted instead by type. For example, I might have folders for “Toys” then inside, “Transformers”, “Marvel”, “Imports”, “LEGO”, etc. Within those folders, I often will break it down further by lines, or individual figures, since I (used to) take little galleries for use in reviews. Other folders are broken down the same way, photos of projects, photos of electronics, photos of random scenery, sorted down and categorized.

We also use a similar set up for eBay photos, though I don’t really take any of those. I have a shared folder JUST for eBay photos, so my wife and daughters can keep everything sorted and together for the work they do selling on eBay and other online store fronts.

Not Photos

I do something similar with images that aren’t photos as well, though I don’t later back any of these up. Because I am a digital pack rat, I save a ton of random memes and images from the internet. I have a monthly reminder to clean my phone off. These files all dump onto my laptop in a folder named for the year and month, then these images are manually sorted down based on what they are. I’ve honestly gotten better about not just saving piles or random images lately.

Regular Consolidation

Speaking of the Monthly reminders, this system works best if it’s kept up regularly. I have a monthly reminder to offload my phone files, but this only works if I actually DO the sorting, which I make a point of doing.

We have also started regularly dumping everyone’s phones once a month. Though not necessarily removing the files, that’s up to everyone individually, everyone in my house is an adult at this point. But we still consolidate photos as needed for events or activities, since it’s not uncommon for say, my daughter to be taking photos at Christmas, that my wife may want to use in a scrapbook.

Old Photos

I have not gotten as far as I’d like in this project, but I have also started work scanning and archiving older printed photographs. It’s nice to have these digitized since it means they can be archived and backed up and even reproduced for scrapbook albums or whatever. My wife has made scrapbooks for each of our three kids, generally for each year (sometimes two) and so she often uses multiple copies of the same photograph.

Consolidation

The other good part of having everything together is it makes it way easier to keep backed up. I plan to do an entire separate post on the overall backup process, but having things consolidated, makes it way easier to manage and ensure everything is being captured and saved.

Organizing Digitally – The NAS

I want to do a sort of series about how I have my digital world organized but I was sort of trying to decide the best place to start. I wanted to run down some file structure methods, and I want to run down Office 365 use, and previous backup methods, but ultimately, the core of everything, is my NAS.

So this is also sort of a followup to that last set of articles about my Synology NAS. I am sure there are other ways to do a lot of what the Synology does, but there are a lot of simple to use built in features that are nicely integrated into my workflow. It’s a little pricey to set up initially, with the box and the drives, but the reality it, any good solution will be.

Features I Use

These aren’t in any particular order, but I wanted to touch on the aspects of the NAS that I use pretty regularly.

  • OpenVPN – I used to go to a lot of hassle opening up firewall ports on my home network to different devices and machines, so I could access web cams or SSH to different servers and blah blah blah. This is a bit of a security problem, since it means lots of open target points as well. I’ve long since dumped that in favor of OpenVPN, which is built into the NAS. I connect through my laptop or my phone to my home network, then I connect to whatever network drive or SSH connection I need to. It works perfectly and requires way less hassling with the firewall.
  • Download Station – This is essentially a Tor downloader, though I think it can handle a lot of other url types. I don’t really directly interact with this, I keep a folder for incoming files that I occasionally sort and a watch folder for Torrent files that it pulls from. The fun part is syncing the watch folder using One Drive, so I can dump Torrent files to it from anywhere. And for what it’s worth, I don’t use this for piracy, primarily I use it for downloading Humble Bundle purchases. A bundle often has 20+ items, so I will bulk download the torrents (to save HB some bandwidth) and then dump them into the watch folder.
  • Video Station/DS Video – I tried running Plex for watching digital movies from the NAS but it was flaky as hell since there isn’t an official Synology app and Plex is increasingly pushing their subscription nonsense instead of just being a client/server self hosted application. Fortunately, there are Synology Apps for Fire TV (Which I use for streaming on both TVs). So I’ve sorted all of my home movies into the Videos folder and (for a future blog post) encoded them to be easily accessible and compatible.
  • Photo Station – Ok, I don’t actually use this… yet… but I want to revisit it going forward. I want to do a separate post on photos with more details, but basically, I wasn’t using the Photos folder for backup purposes, and that situation has changes recently.
  • Audio Station – I have a ton of music from different sources compiled and sorted together. It’s not my primary GoTo for music, but I want to get more organized playlists going so I can more easily use this for playing my music. For the most part, I am fine with just sticking music ON my phone though.
  • Mail Station – I don’t use Mail Station for actually sending emails, but I did set up the Mail Station server and I use it as a deep archive of emails. I essentially have all my email I have ever sent, going back to the 90s, pulled forward through various email clients, and now it’s all dumped into a Mail Server in a sorted, searchable archive.
  • Cloud Sync – Cloud Sync lets you hook your Synology to various cloud drive services and sync them to your local drives. I’ve got several Dropbox accounts that I have used in the past (Personal, server syncing, each family member) and now a couple of One Drive accounts for backup and personal document sync all linked. It even does Google Drive.

Features I Stopped Using

There aren’t a lot of features I have stopped using, but there are a couple.

  • Web Station – The Synology comes with an optional Webserver and a weird WordPress system that can be enabled. This has been weirdly buggy since day one and I already have plenty of experience managing LAMP stack servers. I recently disted off one of my older Pis, set it up with WordPress and moved the primary use I was using the Synology Web Station for to the Pi. Mostly, It was just a WordPress Archive of all of my old blog posts from various blogs. The links were weird and didn’t work properly because it didn’t quite understand subdirectories or something. The images were present but they didn’t always work because they pointed to old URLs and working the SQL system to change them always came off as wonky. Basically, I didn’t need this archive to be on the NAS and it was an easy thing to just offload to another device.
  • Cloud Station Server – This is a back up system for devices and computers. It will sync specific local folders to a folder on the NAS as a backup. Maybe I was doing something wrong but it always felt really flaky as well, so I just sort of stopped using it. I had it on every laptop in the family for a while but as laptops were replaced, then things started getting weird and getting others to grok how to pull back their files wasn’t super easy either. The better solution I have found is to just give everyone a shared folder specific to them that they can shove files they want to keep into. For my personal use it was just redundant because my entire workflow for years has essentially been cloud based with Dropbox or One Drive keeping everything backed up by default.
  • Surveillance Station – I still sort of use this, but all of my webcams died except one, which doesn’t have night mode anymore. So, it exists and I would use it, but I don’t really use it much anymore. Also. frankly, there was never anything worth seeing on the recordings.

Workflow

The real workflow from the NAS comes from shared folders. Everyone has access to the Family Photos folder mapped to their laptops. I created a shared folder for all of the Blog graphics my wife was using for her blog work that everyone can access since my daughters both helped her with that. They use a shared drive for all of the Ebay and Mercari photos they work on.

I keep folders for photos, and videos and ebooks. I keep folders for important family documents like Tax Returns. All of this can easily be synced to a backup in the cloud and I have a couple of USB keys and loose drives that I do periodic manual backups to, that get stuck in a fire proof safe.

It also lets me map other network drives in as well, for shuffling files around. I have a whole second Linux box set up that has another 4TB or so space in it across several drives, that I use to store less important files like Installable programs and games, ISOs, temporary files for video editing projects, a mountain of internet memes and images saved over the years, music concerts I’ve downloaded, etc. Plus I can map things like, the web root for my Raspberry Pi, or set up a one way(ish) SSH tunnel to my Webserver for pulling backups through.

The box itself sits behind the TV upstairs, and if there ever was a fire or something, it’s likely one of the things I might try to grab on the way out the door, but I’d like to thing my system is robust enough that even if it were lost anything important would be recoverable.

Synology Phase 03 – The Apps

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ScreenShot253 The key component of the Synology is the Software.  You can buy cheaper NAs devices if you just want a network storage device.  Honestly, the price justification is almost entirely in the software, though the Hardware RAID (as opposed to Software RAID) is a partial factor as well.  The box itself isn’t all that sophisticated or exciting honestly.

I don’t plan to cover every available app by any means this is just sort of a run down of some of the apps I find useful, and probably the ones that are most commonly used.

Photo Station

The main reason I even bothered with investing in a NAS at all was because of my Photo collection.  Everything else is a bonus.  I’ve got 250GB of family photos I’ve taken over the years, plus a whole mess of other photos from Blog Posts etc.  I’ve gone through a drive crash on them and the drives I’ve been using are aging rapidly.  The wife doesn’t care to lose photos either.

Photostation is of course, made for Photos, and it’s pretty great.  The interface is very similar to OneDrive, which is is probably my favorite interface of all the photo services I’ve used.  Everything flows together to make a wall of photos, real great for easy navigation.  There are also tagging functions which I plan to use later once everything is loaded.

Audio Station

I’ve tried several solutions for streaming my audio collection to my phone.  I had sort of mostly settled on Google Play Music since it’s the only service that would let me upload my entire collection of some 20,000 songs at once.  I don’t really NEED all these songs at once but I do like having the option.  I buy most music these days via Amazon and so streaming via Amazon is always an alternative as well.

Unfortunately, my recent conversion to Windows Phone from Android means neither service is an option.  I’ve been back to putting music on my device like a caveman.  Fortunately, there is a DSMusic app available for Windows Phone, and I don’t have to worry about any limitations of any service, it’s just all there.  Now I just need to build some good playlists.

A secondary benefit here, Google Play Music was one of the few Google Services I still sometimes used.  I’ve worked pretty hard to divorce myself from all things Google for a variety of reasons, primarily privacy concerns and secondary they are starting to push their own semi proprietary services on the web over long standing more open ones.  Basically, they are using their considerable size to bully everyone to their methods.  “Don’t Be Evil” doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore, but anyway, Google isn’t the topic here.  Having a good Google Music alternative that works on WP is.

Download Station

I don’t use Torrents too often, mostly for my Humble Bundle downloads, but the Synology has a really nice built in Torrent client.  I don’t have to worry about keeping a program running elsewhere or drive space on my PC in use, it just downloads them right to the NAS.  There is even some auto extraction settings, though I have not looked into those yet.

Web Station

A nice little bonus here I wasn’t quite aware existed before buying this NAS, it can function as a web server.  I’ve long given up hosting my own web sites from my house but I do keep some wordpress and other files on an internal web server for archival purposes.  The web server has allowed me to archive these files off my Ubuntu Server to the NAS, which also means I get the backup functionality of the NAS itself.

Note Station

Another unexpected surprise, though I have not explored it completely yet, the Synology includes an app called Note Station, which can sync (or at least download) from Evernote.  I’ve been racking my brain for a while on a good way to backup my Evernote notes, with ideas ranging from Print to PDF using some script to just pulling it weekly to a PC client.  Problem solved.

Cloud Sync

Another nice backup feature, The Synology can hook into and sync with both Dropbox and One Drive.  I use One Drive for some backups and Dropbox for some phone syncing so pulling both to an internal local storage is a plus.  I may even look into using One Drive as a secondary backup like I had originally planned.  Office 365 now includes unlimited storage on One drive, in addition to client licenses for 5 copies of Office (there are conveniently 5 people in my family all with PCs).  It’s a really tempting offer, and with it I could set up the Synology to start pushing all (or select) data to the cloud for an offsite backup.

Surveillance Station

Last, and the ONLY feature I have been disappointed with so far is the Surveillance Station.  I mentioned recently setting up cameras for monitoring and security.  I currently have three cameras and may install a few more.  The Synology only allows the use of 2 cameras before needing to purchase additional licenses.  I’m not super irritated about the additional cost, I get the whole “It supports dev costs”” thing.  My problem is that licenses are $60+, EACH.  If I wanted to add another 3 cameras like I am considering, I’d need 4 more licenses, or $240.  I’d be alright with maybe $10-$15 per seat, or even $60 for “unlimited” (within the capacity of the device) but $60 each is a little ridiculous.

I suspect there is some lame ass license fees Synology has to pay to someone involved but that is also kind of giving them the benefit of the doubt.

I’m still super satisfied with the box, but having better/cheaper access to Surveillance station seats would be eliminating my Ubuntu server completely.