I've personally learned the following lessons the hard way: Lesson 1: "RAID isn't a backup." If all you do is copy your files to a NAS, they aren't safe. If yo

I've personally learned the following lessons the hard way: Lesson 1: "RAID isn't a backup." If all you do is copy your files to a NAS, they aren't safe. If you're NAS is taking snapshots onto a different physical spindle, that's good, but it's better to have your NAS backed up to a physically separate device, in case of cryptolocker attacks or hardware failures. Lesson 2: if it's not automatic, it won't get done. Set up Resilio Sync or SyncThing or your NAS-specific backup software on your phone to pull photos and videos off and back then up automatically. Set up a cron job on your NAS to backup. Lesson 3: consider an off-site backup. Backblaze has a great service, and so do other cloud services. Lesson 4: don't use a digital asset manager that requires proprietary hardware or messes with your original files. Google photos, for example, is free, but garbles much of the metadata tags in your files, and downsamples your videos into a blurry mess (even if you use original quality). Failed photo startups are astoundingly prevalent. Use something that's been designed to continue even if the company doesn't. Amusingly enough, I'm working on a photo startup (spoiler: it satisfies what I wanted from lesson 4!). It's currently in closed beta, if you're interested in trying it out and sharing feedback: https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/