wifi can be a bit slow, and 5GHz can especially be problematic if you have walls to cross. That said, Darktable has a “local copy” feature which you can use to keep a local copy of photos that you are currently working on, so that you don’t hit the network all the time.
It should be fine. If it’s not, try wired, and if it’s not, replace the raspi with something more powerful. 
I hard-wire anything that doesn’t move, save the wifi for the tablets and cellphones. On a given channel, you’re competing not only amongst your devices, but anyone else in the neighborhood on that same channel.
Even with a wired connection, I think the bottleneck on your RPi will be the USB interface. I have six RPis around the house (sprinkler control, experimenting with camera control right now), but I do my “NAS” on PC builds with SATA HDDs, wired ethernet. rsync works great; I just run a script with a rsync command every time I upload images from my camera and everything gets put on two machines.
My oldest son has a few.
I have sent his comments as PM to you.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I agree 100%. I will play around with the Pi and will upgrade to something else if needs be. I have seen some single board computers with SATA interface. I just hope I can keep mainstream and won’t have to deal with systems with custom linux kernel, etc.
Right now, I’m configuring a RPi as a camera image collector/controller. Connected to the camera with USB, running QDSLRDashboard’s ddserver to make the camera controls available on the WiFi to my tablet running QDSLRDashboard. Works, as far as I have tested it, and a whole bunch cheaper than Nikon’s product to do this. Next to try is using gphoto2 alongside this software lashup to capture raws, process them to small JPEGs and post them to some album.
Later, if I decide to pursue some sort of astrophotography, the same box would be a candidate to control the mount. All just good fun…
On my desktop pc I have a RAID1 for my home partition. I’m using restic to backup to my NAS system (RAID1) and to a SSD every 6 month with the most important data. The SSD has a friend of mine.
I don’t think there is a better tool than restic for backups! A backup is only a backup if you can verify that the data can be restored!
Interesting that I didn’t read any responses the mentioned Amazon Prime backup.
My set up is as follows:
What’s interesting to me, is that JPG and raw (CR2) files do not count against any storage limits in Amazon Prime photo backup. Video does count.
Are you doing that with their Windows client tool?
Synology has an Amazon sync tool, it’s part of the NAS. I think it runs on their BusyBox Linux variant. So, all the configuration is on the Synology NAS to Amazon side. I use, of course, the Rapid Photo Downloader to transfer directly from Ubuntu workstation, to the NAS (mirrored drives), and the Amazon Prime synchronization kicks in immediately. I have spent a lot of time trying out different combinations of cloud backups, and this is the one that has stuck.
The only hitch, is that I chose NFS for networking and it requires raw user ids (e.g. 1026) rather than user names (e.g. mike). The GUID and UID had to be set to match up. Somehow, I convinced myself that I absolutely needed the NFS transfer rate. Glad to have it, but in hindsight, I’m not sure it’s worth the setup.
My benefit is that I get a quick mirrored backup, over NFS, and then a cloud backup for all CR2, JPG, TIFF and XCF. Depending on the amount of data I’m transferring, the upload to Amazon will be running in the background.
I wasn’t aware of that. That’s great. The windows Amazon prime photos client was truly awful when I looked at it a couple of years ago. It was the most badly written program I’d seen for many years! It used vast amounts of CPU and even managed to trash some of my photos (seriously). What a nightmare. I was able to restore my trashed pics from local backup, fortunately.
Damon, maybe that’s why Amazon Prime media backup isn’t widely adopted–if the general UI is poor. As for trashing photos, years ago I had my backup drive fail and my desktop was incomplete (I was not being organized). After paying too much money for a clean-room recovery I was much, much more motivated to get everything right. Final comment on Synology: I was leaning to building a FreeNAS, but the support on Synology has been more than worth the price.
I’m using an HP Microserver Gen 8 (4 drive capacity) running Rockstor. I started with 2 x WD Red in raid 1 but had one die and I think the other is getting that way. So I’ve added a pair of Seagate Iron Wolf drives and started migrating the important stuff that way.
Rockstor supports Docker containers. Apart from some media server containers, I also run Duplicati. This automatically backs up my chosen data to BackblazeB2 (cheaper than Amazon for me).
My main PC doesn’t have a lot of storage, so I usually try to delete rejected raw photos then use rsync to copy them along with sidecars to the Rockstor NAS.
BackblazeB2 is a terrific price. What I can’t figure out, is the real-world pricing when all my updates are being constantly resynched. The bottom line, for me, is that the Amazon Prime is about $120/yr for unlimited photo storage (not video), and then I get the extra value of shipping discounts, Prime movies, etc. (which have nothing to do with the apples-to-apples comparison).