[Closed] IT-trackworld - to NAs or not to NAS ??

We use a Synology with 12TB at work for just this.  The nice thing is it is easy to swap in a new it even a larger drive if one dies and it seems to handle it well (assuming RAID is set up -the Synology version is fine).  Using the web interface 8s a nice way to scroll through photos if you don't have another method set up.  The interface is fast enough for images but for videos we download the workspace to a local machine first.

You can also set up the Synology to be accessed from the web if you need to share finished stuff with others although exposing stuff to the web might not be the best idea if you have other options.  Depends what you are doing really

I think it is easy enough to set up for someone who isn't a complete technophobe

How many bays depends a bit on how much cash you have.  4 is nice as you start with two disks then add two more as you need more space. You can then upgrade the original 2 later if you need even more space (you do one at a time and let it copy the data to the new one before replacing the second).

If the whole device dies you can just buy a new Synology and stick the drives in to that. Seems to work even with newer devices (I've had to do it once already)

I run QNAP at home and Synology for work. I'm not particularly networking savvy but currently there's an offer of free  perpetual VPN licensing on the Synology boxes if you wish to use the web in stealth mode or phone home safely. Both appear to be similar levels of complexity to get the best out of (it's like a Mac/PC difference thing) with a decent GUI to work with.

You can play with the both interfaces online before buying via their support pages.

If you plan on running a PLEX instance for serving media around the home make sure it has the RAM & processor umpf to transcode on the fly.

Yeah NAS would be the way to go, get it set up in Raid5 or synology hybrid raid for redundancy and then use the USB drives for external backups (store them off site for proper backup redundancy).

If you make sure you've got gigabit ethernet from the nas to your PC you shouldn't see any bottlenecks, it would have a theoretical transfer rate of 125 MB a second.

Check here to see how much usable space you'd get https://www.synology.com/en-uk/support/RAID_calculator for instance 4x 4TB drives in SHR gives you 12TB of storage. You'd need a 4 bay NAS for that, obviously.

Got a Synology 1 drive here, works fine. Easy enough to set it up, if you just want a simple file server.

I don't think there's much point in RAID for home use. Assuming you have proper backups, shouldn't take too long to replace the drive and restore what you need.
You can plug a USB drive into the Synology, and set it to automatically backup to that. So you could swap a few USB drives over, and keep them in a safe place.

I don’t think there’s much point in RAID for home use. Assuming you have proper backups, shouldn’t take too long to replace the drive and restore what you need.
You can plug a USB drive into the Synology, and set it to automatically backup to that. So you could swap a few USB drives over, and keep them in a safe place

I half agree with you, but only half.  The problem is the 'live' stuff.  If you have a theft and someone just lifts anything lying around then they pick up both the Synology and the attached USB.  If you don't have the USB attached then you have a gap between now and when you last backed up and stored in the safe place.  Apart from that I would agree

Drives do die though.  I've got a number of Synology devices and I've had 3 drives die over the years.  It's nice just being able to buy a new drive and put it and have everything sync back up rather than hunt around for backups and try and remember how to restore them (which you need to always check you can do anyway of course).  It's just a question of cash.  If you have it then go for the RAID as it reduces one more stress

I've got a headless NAS that I built in 2013 using a Fractal Node case, Asus m/board, 6 x 4TB HDDs in a RAID config for the storage, 1 x 64GB SSD for the OS to be installed on, 32GB of RAM (way, way more than I need), a fanless PSU (silent) and running the free OS that is XigmaNAS. It's great. Hasn't missed a beat. Easily turned on and off remotely using an icon on my laptop and still loads of storage capacity left. So, I'd recommend you build your own. I was dreaming about having a QNAP back when I wanted one but couldn't afford it. However, I personally think not being tied into a manufacturers ecosystem and really understanding how everything works has a lot of value in addition to the financial savings. The hard parts are choosing the components and setting up the permissions to shared areas once the OS is installed but, I overcame those hurdles so would have no doubt anyone else can too.

It's a good option, but they do need upkeep. I've got a QNAP ts-228a and it often requires firmware updates and app updates.
It's good, but more faff than I realised, and I didn't realise I would need to be quite as IT savvy as I should really be.

If I got another one, I'd probably go for a more powerful one. Mine struggles to multi-task, e.g running the anti-virus and tagging images. You might say run the AV at night which I do, but it takes ages to run (full AV run of all folders was taking over 48hrs). I've recently trimmed it to 19hrs(!) by setting it to quick scan.

I've got an old WD MyCloud. It sits with FLAC music files on it for my SONOS and the computer backs up to it, it has a USB drive plugged in the whole time which it backs up to nightly.

My computer also backs up to Carbonite.

I was going to replace it with a newer NAS and use it for all my storage, but it was easier just to stick another SSD in the computer.

I'll keep an eye on this thread because I might do something about it eventually.

I don’t think there’s much point in RAID for home use

Arguably there's *more* reason for home stuff. If your NAS contains all your family photos and a disk dies, it is ALL GONE. With a working RAID setup you buy a new disk and you don't lose any files or access.

Do remember that RAID isn't backup though, it's uptime: two disks can die at once, or the NAS could get flooded, or stolen.

QNAP or Synology are both good suggestions. Give yourself space for expansion: might be worth going for a four-bay NAS with only two disks in for example. My NAS is now a HP Microserver but it's the media server and backup (via Time Machine) for all the laptops too.

I was dreaming about having a QNAP back when I wanted one but couldn’t afford it. However, I personally think not being tied into a manufacturers ecosystem and really understanding how everything works has a lot of value in addition to the financial savings.

Yeah I got a small QNAP, didn't take too long for me to abandon their ecosystem and flash Debian to it as I wanted something much more lean but customizable than QNAP provided. Came close to hard bricking it a few times but just managed wiggle out. So if I were buying a new NAS, I'd make sure I was free to install whatever OS I wanted without having to jump through hoops flashing the OS and having the threat of bricking it on every major update. Which reminds me, I need to update :-/

RAID is not a backup. And it means more things to go wrong, eg the controller failing, or screwing things up if you don't know what you are doing.

If worried about fire/theft I'd go for another NAS device at the other end of the house, or at a friends house. And backup to that automatically.
It is worth having a separate offline backup copy as well. If you get a virus, or ransomware, or file corruption etc, don't want that to automatically copy over your backup.

Operating system updates from QNAP  appear every couple of months, sometimes monthly if they discover a security hole. I have a TS251+ at home with 8GB of RAM. For really heavy duty operations M2 SSD drives can be inserted in some of them to work as a RAM extension.

If you're planning on some heavy duty work you may need something with more processing power. You can also buy expansion enclosures that either plugin with USB, e-SATA or similar.

My QNAP Silent NAS (TS251?) is a bit long in the tooth now, but still not noticably slow. Even accessing over the internet it plays music files cleanly, no drop outs, so you wouldn't get any "lag" with photos. Planning to replace it in about 6 months, will get another QNap, as their apps do all I need.

RAID is not a backup. And it means more things to go wrong, eg the controller failing, or screwing things up if you don’t know what you are doing.

If worried about fire/theft I’d go for another NAS device at the other end of the house, or at a friends house. And backup to that automatically.
It is worth having a separate offline backup copy as well. If you get a virus, or ransomware, or file corruption etc, don’t want that to automatically copy over your backup.

No, but with hard drives it's not a case of if a drive will die, but when.

To protect your data you need redundancy in your drives for a drive failure, a regular backup (depending how often you're creating new files, once a day isn't unreasonable), then a 2nd backup held off site - this can be cloud or just a weekly backup at a relatives house.

That covers you for drive failure, a bigger data loss (2nd drive failing when rebuilding a raid array for eg), and fire/flood/theft damage.

Depending how important the data is depends how far you go with redundancy and backups, if its how you make your living then I'd suggest the most robust option you can.

Watching this with interest.

I have a synology ds215J that has spent the last 6 years or so with a single drive in it acting as a laptop backup for the macbook (our only non wor owned computer) via timemachine.

That drive in it failed a couple of weeks ago and I now have two new drives ready to pop in it.

My only debate is how to set the whole thing up. It is very likely that in the next few months we will go from one laptop to the old macbook and a windows laptop and a desktop. It would be good to use the synology as a central source for all files and photos. rather that backing up what it on each separately. Slower I guess - but how much slower?

At least one of the computers will indulge in a good amount of lightroom - I suppose you could hold the current files being worked on locally (backing them up to the synology) then archive them at a last date.

Finally maybe for a bit of belt and braces external HDD to take an image of the synology say once every month and store it elsewhere? Where we will be living soon has pretty mediocre broadband - like 5mbps on a good day so backup over cloud is probably not much of a goer.

You might say run the AV at night which I do

No, I'd say "turn it off."

You do a full scan so you know you're clean at this point in time. You're then running on-demand protection which scans anything new coming into the system. So where exactly is a virus going to appear from which necessitates regular scans of terabytes of data, 99% of which hasn't changed since the last time you scanned it?

Arguably there’s *more* reason for home stuff. If your NAS contains all your family photos and a disk dies, it is ALL GONE. With a working RAID setup you buy a new disk and you don’t lose any files or access.

That's absolutely the wrong reason to run RAID, because as you say in the next paragraph,

Do remember that RAID isn’t backup though, it’s uptime:

There are other benefits, but one of the main points of RAID is that if a disk goes pop you can just swap it out without having to worry about restoring from backups. The question isn't "can I do without my data?" but rather "can I do without my data for a day?"

Hmm. Starting to think that NAS is not the solution to my problem. I don’t envisage wanting to access my data remotely, or from multiple computers, and I don’t need more complexity in my life, so maybe boring old disk drives are the way to go. Now if only large SSD were affordable !!

A lot of folk believe that a NAS with raid is a backup but sadly this is far from the case.

A couple of things they forget is that if a drive fails the lost data needs to be rebuilt from the remaining drives, this means high io on the remaining drives for the rebuild duration.
If the drive have failed because it’s reached the end of its lifespan hammering the remaining drives that are the same age has associated risks and if one of them fails then the data’s gone.

Another thing to consider is bad batches, if your raid array has disks from the same manufacturing batch then batch or firmware issues can increase multiple failures.

NAS and raid are great if you have either totally disposable data or a robust backup plan.

NAS and raid are great if you have either totally disposable data or a robust backup plan.

That's risk though, you could die from catching something shopping these days. What if what if what if ad infinitum. My data isn't totally disposable and I don't have any backup.

@convert You can use the cloud for back up but you will need to find a provider that will accept a HD from you to install everything on their computer and you would need to avoid adding to your data until it was uploaded at their end. You can then use incremental back-ups to keep everything synched. (1GB is around 30mins to an hour upload time on your particular wet string connection, I use similar at work).

Thanks - useful information.

That’s risk though, you could die from catching something shopping these days. What if what if what if ad infinitum.

This is Risk Management 101. Everything you do in life carries a risk and you make continual assessments as to whether your actions merit taking a risk. Getting out of bed of a morning is a risk, in your sleepy state you could turn your ankle or trip over the cat.

Consciously or subconsciously, we're balancing likelihood and severity against reward. Crossing the road we could be hit by a bus. Likelihood low, severity high, reward high, most of us take that risk.

My data isn’t totally disposable and I don’t have any backup.

So risk of failure here (generously) medium, severity of failure absolutely critical. You are, with all due respect, a fool. Backup is easy, data recovery is both difficult and four-figure-sum expensive.

And captmorgan explained this very well. One could argue "one drive has failed, what are the chances of lightning striking twice" and on the face of it it'd seem massively unlucky for you to have a second drive fail before you've replaced and rebuilt the first. But those drives are likely identical models, identical ages, identical usage and wear patterns, and spinny-disk drives contain moving parts which are inherently prone to failure as they eventually wear out... suddenly the chances of the same thing happening again seems rather more likely, doesn't it.

And that's just mechanical disk failure. What if the array backplane shits itself; the NAS's PSU implodes and fries all the drives; you're burgled, have a fire, flood or other physical disaster; the files get corrupted or you accidentally delete them; etc etc etc.

One other thing to consider:

As drive capacities get ever bigger and arrays get ever wider, rebuild time is shooting up accordingly. In the enterprise world there's starting to be a shift away from RAID5 because even on enterprise-grade server hardware-RAID controllers it's taking a phenomenal amount of time to perform a rebuild.

Cougar

No, I’d say “turn it off.”

You do a full scan so you know you’re clean at this point in time. You’re then running on-demand protection which scans anything new coming into the system. So where exactly is a virus going to appear from which necessitates regular scans of terabytes of data, 99% of which hasn’t changed since the last time you scanned it?

Hmmm, I have to say the thought did occur to me that it probably wasn't needed.
The reason I set it up is because there's a security report that regularly runs and tells you things like 'you haven't changed your password for X days' and I think one of the warnings was that no anti-virus was scheduled.
But yes, you're right everything that goes into it comes through the laptop with Windows Defender. Although my photos get synced with it via QSync. I suppose that is a low risk entry point for a virus? I have very little knowledge about this kind of thing, so probably err on the side of caution.

I don't know what QSync is. But I would have thought that if the NAS has its own virus scanner, it would also have its own real-time protection?

In any case, photos aren't exactly a high-risk infection vector. It probably has happened but I can't offhand think of any malware that was spread via image files beyond lame tricks like filenames of "photo.jpg.exe".

QSync is a sync tool so you can always always keep a location 'up to date'. Similar to how people use work laptops, I guess. You sync from the network to a local location so you can work on those items when sat at the airport etc.

I have it set-up to automatically copy pics from my phone's storage folder to a folder on the NAS.

Not sure about whether the NAS has real-time protection. I'll check up on that.

@stumpy01 QNAP have malware remover that carries out scheduled scans or if you must there's a McAfee anti-virus too. McAfee costs, the other one is free.

So risk of failure here (generously) medium, severity of failure absolutely critical. You are, with all due respect, a fool. Backup is easy, data recovery is both difficult and four-figure-sum expensive.

I'm not so tied to my data I consider it absolutely critical, mostly my data/code is just a result of play/experiment. Attitude might be different if livelihood depended on it - which is probably what is under discussion so I'll shut it 🙂

Other than I'm not sure I agree backup is easy - it's a complex enough subject for me to not bother to learn.

Other than I’m not sure I agree backup is easy – it’s a complex enough subject for me to not bother to learn.

Many people don’t bother, often they lose data and wish they had. Some then find out it wasn’t as challenging as they first thought, sadly all too late...

I would definitely go with a NAS just for the ease of having one large, easily expandable virtual drive with all your photos on.
Synology hybrid raid makes for useful local redundancy for single drive failure (think it can view with 2 drives in a 4 or 5 drive config?) But also the option to expand by replacing smaller drives with larger ones.

For backup, run Cloud Station and back everything up to one of the supported cloud storage providers.

I'm just a home user - and I can only talk to my experience, but my Synology NAS is one of the few tech items that I'm 100% pleased with - it does everything I want it to do, but requires virtually no admin/maintenance once it's up an running. It downloads it's own updates, runs it's own virus scans, and sends me an email if it needs me to do anything (if one of the drives is wearing out, or I'm running out of room).

From my own pre-purchase research, it seems like Synology are he most user friendly, but with QNAP not far behind (and offering more powerful units for a similar cost).

I'm generally very wary of buying new tech...... it's got to have a clear net effect of making things simpler/easier rather than just adding complexity for small benefits vs the alternative. The Synology Nas (mostly used to run Plex media server, but also backups of our laptops, central file repository, dropbox-like server etc) is a huge win in that regard - particularly when compared to using USB drives - which is what I used to do.