The whole archive starts with one simple rule: every photo either of us takes should land on our home NAS by itself, with no monthly cloud fee. Two phones, one box in the house, automatic.

That’s the first stage of the pipeline. It mostly “just works” — until, one day, it quietly doesn’t. This post covers both: how to set it up, and how I noticed one phone had stopped.

The Setup

Each phone runs the Synology Drive app. It watches the camera folder and copies new photos and videos to the NAS over the internet. Because both phones back up to the same NAS, each one lands in its own separate space:

  • My phone backs up to my user folder on the NAS.
  • My wife’s phone backs up to her user folder on the NAS.

Keeping them in separate folders matters later. When I sort photos, I want to know which phone a file came from, and the folder tells me. (The pipeline records that source, too — the “A or B” from the cutting-board post.)

The important settings, in plain terms:

  • Back up the camera folder, not the whole phone.
  • Include videos, not just photos — videos are the heart of a growth archive.
  • Let it run in the background so it doesn’t wait for you to open the app.

Once that’s on, a photo taken today shows up on the NAS within minutes of the phone being on home Wi-Fi. No uploading, no sharing, no bill.

Why No Monthly Fee

This is the part I like most. Big photo services charge you every month to store your growing library. My daughter’s files only get more numerous, so that bill would only grow.

Here it’s different: the files live on a disk I already own, in my own house. Backing up two phones for two years cost me exactly $0 in fees. The NAS uses a little electricity; that’s the entire ongoing cost.

When One Phone Quietly Stops

Auto-backup has one weakness: it’s silent. When it works, you see new files. When it fails, you also see… nothing. Nothing new just looks like a quiet day.

At one point I realized my wife’s phone had stopped backing up while mine kept going. The photos were safe on her phone, but they weren’t reaching the NAS, so they weren’t reaching the archive. Here’s how I tracked it down:

  • Compare the two folders. My folder had recent files; hers had a gap. That gap is the clue — one phone is fine, one isn’t, so it’s a phone-side problem, not the NAS.
  • Check the app on the quiet phone. Background permission, battery optimization, and “back up on mobile data” settings are the usual culprits on Android — the system can put the backup app to sleep to save power.
  • The blunt fix that worked. When the app itself got stuck, removing and reinstalling the Drive app on the phone got backup flowing again. Not elegant, but it worked immediately.

The Lesson

Automatic backup is wonderful and a little dangerous for the same reason: it’s invisible. Set it up once and it saves you for years. But because success and failure both look like silence, it’s worth glancing at both phones’ folders now and then to make sure new files are still arriving.

With two phones reliably feeding the NAS, the next stage can begin: the hourly check that copies new files onto the cutting board.