Does your NAS have an SD card slot that you haven't figured out what to do with yet? That SD card slot might be more versatile than you initially thought.
From offloading your photos and videos after a shoot to having a backup of special documents so they're always within arm's reach when you leave the house, here are three cool things to do with the SD card on your NAS.
Automatically back up photos or videos to specific folders
Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek
One of the most annoying parts about getting done with a photo or video shoot for me is offloading my footage to the computer. As I still shoot with a traditional mirrorless camera, I use full-size SD cards to capture all of my footage. With a NAS that has a built-in SD card slot, that process can be made much simpler.
You can easily program the NAS to automatically back up the photos and videos to specific folders. Depending on your NAS operating system, it's possible to either just program it to back up the entire SD card to a specific folder, or to separate the photos and videos into their own folders.
I love functionality like this as it takes one annoying step out of having to offload SD cards. I can simply insert card after card from a photo or video shoot and have all the footage end up in a specific folder labeled something like "Unorganized." From there, I can log into the NAS and move the footage where it needs to go.
Having the NAS automatically move the files off the SD card to the array storage saves an annoying step, and also bypasses having to transfer data over the network as it'll be offloaded straight to the NAS. I recently moved to using an all-SSD NAS for my video editing and have loved it.
With an automation like this set up, I can simply plug the SD card into the NAS and not have to worry about hooking it up to my Mac, then opening Finder, and then moving the files from the SD card to the NAS manually. It might not sound like it's a big deal, but it definitely is a huge time saver, especially on larger projects.
In fact, there are even some NAS systems that have auto-backup built-in for SD cards. The UnifyDrive UT2 is one such NAS , and it's even portable, meaning you can handle backing up your footage to a NAS in the field before you ever get home.
Use as a boot drive to keep SATA/NVMe drives free for storage
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
I have a few rack-mount servers in my office, and they all support booting off an SD card. You can actually do this with a normal desktop too, but it might be a bit trickier to set up depending on your BIOS.
Why would you ever want to boot off an SD card? There are a few reasons. For starters, it makes moving systems much easier as all you have to do is move a small SD card instead of a full-size drive. My Unraid server boots off a flash drive, and it's super simple to move from system to system.
Another benefit is that booting from an SD card keeps your traditional SSD/HDD free for normal storage instead of being the boot drive. Some operating systems can take up quite a bit of space, so having it on a dedicated SD card keeps your other storage free for doing whatever else you need.
One final benefit is SD cards are both cheap and small. If you have your boot SD card being backed up somewhere constantly, and it fails, you can just grab another SD card from a drawer and be up and running in no-time. It's not always as easy to have spare SSDs on-hand, and SSDs also take more work to remove and re-install.
Keep transportable backups of important docs
Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek
I'll admit, this is something that I wish I had thought of sooner. Using something like cron or even Syncthing , you can set up your NAS to back up specific folders to a certain location. This can be used to ensure multiple computers stay in sync, or just to make sure a copy of your files are always on a certain storage medium.
If you have an SD card that always lives in your NAS, then you can use software to constantly back up certain documents and files from the NAS to the SD card. This means that you can grab that SD card before leaving for vacation, heading to work, or even just leaving the house, and you'll always have those documents and files with you.
For instance, if you had a 512GB SD card in your NAS, then you could have your most precious movies and photos automatically back up from the NAS to the SD card every night. Then, when you go on vacation, you can grab the SD card, and you have a backup of the memories that you couldn't bear to lose in case of catastrophe.
This seems like a simple thing, but knowing that your important documents and other files are always backed up to that SD card, which you can grab every time you leave the house could be just the peace of mind you've been searching for.
These are just a few things that you can do with the SD card slot on your NAS. However, it's far from the only ways to use a NAS. Here are several other ways to use your NAS if you're just getting started.
