I have been using exclusively a HUAWEI P30 Pro for more than a year for all my photos. I chose it for its lightness (when hiking) and ability to take “macro” photos.
About the storage, I would advise to have at least 1 backup on a separate external disk, but 2 backups would be better. I have been told about someone who got a failure with his computer and who then figured out that his backup disk was also out of order. He lost everything.
For all my data, I have 3 external backups (1 at home, 1 at the office, 1 at my father’s place). Even if there is fire in 2 places, at least I would still have something left… Prevention takes time. It’s a choice. A choice that you can do only before.
A RAID may protect your data against the failure of 1 drive, but not against a virus overwriting the data. Better have 1 or 2 external simple backups than a RAID.
Next, we need to be sure that a backup is complete and that it is operational. (I use an AutoIt script to update my backups. Not very user friendly, but I am sure about what it does and this is the 1st important point. The 2nd important point is: if I delete by mistake a folder, I will figure it out before it is removed from my backup (when updating the backup), because this script shows me what it is going to do before it does it and I always check what is going to be added/updated/removed before proceeding).
For my photos files, I use the freeware “Ant Renamer” and I do as illustrated below.
1st step (automated):
2nd step (manual):
3rd step : upload to iNaturalist.
See this feature that helps for IDing automatically a new observation based on the file name:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/extract-species-name-from-photo-filename-upon-upload/6510/13
4th step (semi-automated): add the iNat observation ID and rename all photos belonging to the same observation:
Later, when one of my observations is IDed by someone else, I search for the files using the observation ID and I update the photo files names with the new ID.
I can browse my photos almost as if it were a database.
This seems too much work, but with adequate tools and practice, it’s reasonable.