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Im looking at getting a NAS but would like it to be a raid to try and protect against risk of hardware failure. Anybody use a synology DS223? Not really seen other makes to synology but assume there must be. Has to be a RAID as just had a Hdd fall in me!
I know there is cloud storage but this doesn’t seem to offer ability to do auto iPhone back up and amounts you can buy via things like onedrive are pretty small. And Icloud is only for my iphone so can’t use for the windows laptop.
I have a few Synology NASs set up using the Synology hybrid RAID and it works nicely. Drives die from time to time and I just slam a replacement in and it rebuilds. Had the enclosure die once as well and just put the drives ina newer version of the enclosure and it worked just fine
For the really important stuff that I can't lose I also backup the NAS of course.
Whether or not that's the best solution for your iphone backup I don't know.
With 2 disks you'll be restricted to either RAID 0 or RAID 1. 0 is also known as JBOD there's no data safety and lose one disk and all your data is gone unless you pay a fortune for recovery.
Raid one mirrors data from one disk to the other. This can be rebuilt but the bigger the capacity the longer the rebuild time.
Neither should be considered a back-up strategy. Data only exists if it is stored in 3 places and on different media. You'll be restricted to around 20TB max as HD back-up will take an age for anything more. Some form of solid state acceleration would also be helpful along with more than 2GB of memory.
This Wiki item explains things reasonably well and the synology calculator will help explain how much storage matched pairs of disks can achieve at RAID 1 and 0.
Which synology do you have? I was looking at the cheapest that does RAID.
I can't remember as I have a few and most are old now. As far as I know though all of their NASs with at least two drive bays will support RAID1 and Synology Hybrid Raid but just find a cheap 2 bay model and look it up to check it supports RAID. It does sound like that isn't what you need though
@sandwich, why doesn’t a mirror driver offer back up? Albeit not as robust as three drives.
I have a d718 as my main NAS set up raid 1. This auto backs up to a d218 also raid 1. I then have rotating ssd USB drives to back up the 218.
You need to back up the main NAS so if that fails in a big way you have the data in another place. As Sandwich says you're only really backed up if you have 3 copies, and I think it was Jim schofield in the guardian who said the third should be in a different geographical location (keep one of the usbs with a mate or neighbor)
Sorry... Jack Schofield...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2014/aug/28/the-best-way-to-back-up-data
Backblaze cloud backup might be an option you want to look at for PC? Unlimited backup volume if I remember correctly.
how much do you need to back up?
And yes, one onsite backup isn’t enough if you want to avoid loss from, for example flood or fire. Your level of contingency planning will depend on your risk appetite and £. Having the stuff just on the machine is very risky. Having one backup (that is, a copy of the data not just data stored on an external drive) less risky. Having an offsite backup (like a disk at work or a trusted friend’s house) less risky again. And so on. obviously backups should be regular enough that any data loss is acceptable to you.
on NASs
I’ve a DS1520+ giving ~35TB storage using SHR (allows 1 disc failure). Some of that is occupied by Time Machine backups, Carbon Copy Cloner backups, and Synology Drive syncing.
iPhone backup
You can back up most all the data from an iPhone to a Mac. I’d have assumed that there’s a similar application on Windows.. I’ve rarely done this. Over our 4 adult family we have 200GB of shared iCloud storage that is fine for all our iCloud (Mac and iPhone) syncing and iPhone backups. This excludes photos but includes iCloud documents etc. it has made setting up new iPhones seamless.
I have a d718 as my main NAS set up raid 1. This auto backs up to a d218 also raid 1. I then have rotating ssd USB drives to back up the 218.
Same as @susepic although I only back up data not backed up elsewhere (eg lots of video files held on various portable HDDs in the shed) as the 218 doesn't have enough capacity. I also upgraded the 218 using bigger disks and SHR-1 took care of rebuilding the storage pools. I'm toying with switching the big NAS to SSD and would use the same approach.
5 things can go wrong which jeopardise your data:
1. A single drive failure, which you can protect against using RAID 1, 5 or 10.
2. Multiple drive failures, which can be protected against with RAID 5 and enough discs.
3. A controller failure, this means you need to find a replacement controller with the same or near enough firmware to replace your existing controller...this can be difficult down the line.
4. A corruption - unless you have a recovery strategy from a saved copy, having multiple drives won't help you
5. A physical loss of the array (fire, theft, etc) - You're screwed unless you have an additional back, preferably in another place.
I've experienced 1-4. 1 and 3 on a home asset.
@muddyjames It looks like the more experienced have covered your query since I last posted. Disaster recovery as Daffy posted needs to be in place at home as well. Losing the family photos is not going to be popular with swmbo!
I played around with various cloud backup options and have settled on idrive which is not an apple product. Great functionality and allows backup to cloud as well as local devices.
I claim no expertise - I spoke to people at a synology supplier, told them what i wanted, and they told me the best way to do it. Previously i had a 4 bay NAS with a fancy Raid. I thought I was being clever with inbuilt redundancy, but my mistake that i thought it was working NAS and back up in one device. WHen one disc failed i was able to retrieve data, but when the next one went it was borked with no way to rebuild the stack. I lost a bit of inconsequential data, but had the important stuff on a USB.
The 2x Synology NAS solution works much better as the better performing 718 is the working data, and the 218 is the back up (speed not so important for the back-up NAS). Much easier way to do things and more secure.
Must drop off the USB with my MiL for safe keeping.....
Hmm. So actually cloud storage is value for money then Vs a in house multiple nas backup arrangement
Depends on your use case and waht's valuable. I have a couple of Tb of photos in Lightroom - i can't do that w cloud storage very easily.
Im looking at getting a NAS but would like it to be a raid to try and protect against risk of hardware failure.
OK, so the problem with RAID systems is that you've got identical drives, used identically and with identical mean times to failure.
If one fails then its VERY likely that a second will fail whilst you either try to rebuild it or transfer the data off.
RAID systems can be very fast (small amounts of data read from lots of drives simultaneously) , and you have a chance of recovery. But they shouldn't really be considered as any more secure than a single drive.
The 2x Synology NAS solution
I keep thinking i need to upgrade my backup/storage system, but when you get to this level of complexity for (apparently) little increase in security, it makes me think that my current JBOD (literally) system is not so bad after all. Is there really a big benefit? I'm willing to be persuaded, but just now it's hard to justify the expense and hassle.
I have a couple of Tb of photos in Lightroom – i can’t do that w cloud storage very easily.
Likewise but I have about 4Tb. But I started with Backblaze a while ago and after the initial upload (much smaller at the time) it has been fairly painless to do the incremental additions.
Leftfield suggestion, used PC (I've pulled old Dell Optiplexs out of a skip before), put a selection of drives in and install TrueNAS?
Disadvantage being that it's more involved than an off the shelf box, you want to do at least some reading up to know what you're doing.
Advantages include that you should be using easily substituted hardware, can upgrade the storage reasonably easily and mange it without having to track down another identical unit if yours should fail down the line. Should the worst happen the data should be in a known format that can be accessed from another machine.
If one fails then its VERY likely that a second will fail whilst you either try to rebuild it or transfer the data off.
I'd agree that there's a non-zero chance of failure when rebuilding (and rebuilding an array will be an intensive workout for what may be aging drives). However, I'm not sure I'd call it very likely.
5 things can go wrong which jeopardise your data:
I'd add number 6 - you (or malware on your computer) delete it by mistake. Which is probably my most common reason for restoring data from backups. Worth considering what happens if you hit delete when you're tired thinking you're removing the photos from the SD card that goes in the camera, but you were looking at the wrong copy of the data.
If one fails then its VERY likely that a second will fail whilst you either try to rebuild it or transfer the data off.
Why is that?
So with mirrored disks I’m protected against one disk failing but something else might go wrong that means lose both disks. So ideally have mirror disks and then a separate back up, which is a back up of the back up. Is that right?
Pretty much.
My important stuff is backed up to the PC, the external HDD (a pseudo NAS, an old WD Mycloud that has limited connectivity now) and an external SSD, and a lot of it is obviously on phones etc. I just tend to do the backing up after a holiday.
Another point of a properly implemented backup system (like Apple's Time Machine) is that it is historic - i.e you can recover earlier versions of files. RAID does't do that.
If one fails then its VERY likely that a second will fail whilst you either try to rebuild it or transfer the data off.
Bollocks! Can you quantify this risk? Yes, it might happen. Is it "VERY" likely i.e. does it happen more often than not? No.
RAID is about data availability. What chance of availability do you have if you only have a single drive, and that fails? 0%.
Goes without saying that all important data should be backed-up offsite. With a NAS it's very easy and fairly inexpensive to automate this backup to Google Drive/Backblaze/Amazon etc. Not really a fan of the "manual-backup-to-USB-drive-and-stash-it-somewhere" option!!
Not really seen other makes to synology but assume there must be.
QNAP is probably the other main off-the-shelf one. I've just bought the new Unifi NAS for work use, significantly cheaper than Synology for a rack-mountable unit. It has an odd-number of drives too, so there's a a hot-spare it can use immediately to start rebuilding if there's a failure.
At home I just use a Raspberry Pi running OpenMediaVault - you can just plug in whatever USB drives you have lying around so a very cheap n cheerful solution, but still has the necessary features e.g. RAID, automated cloud backup etc. There are other DIY NAS solutions too including TrueNAS and UnRAID that you can build yourself.
Why is that?
Drives are generally well made and reliable, which means the typical bathtub curve is pretty steep. After however many read/write, boot-up cycles, ow whatever the failure mode turns out to be, they just die.
If you have for example 5 drives, then it's actually 5x more likely you will have a failure at any given time. So what you gain as a benefit of it being rebuildable, you've lost beforehand with a higher probability of failure.
And then 4x more likely (of a now higher probability because they're probably all reaching the end of their life) that you will have another failure during the rebuilding process.
And then once it's done rebuilding you've got to transfer it all again, risking failure again, to a new set of drives because you know know the old ones are at the end of their life.
That and you have the added problem of controllers failing. The disks may be fine but if the controller dies then it's all junk anyway. At least with JBOD you can just put the drives in a new enclosure and it will (unless encrypted via the the controller) just work.
Pro's of RAID
Speed
Debatable improvement in reliability
Pro's of JBOD
If you lose one drive you only lose a fraction of the data, not everything on the server.
Another point of a properly implemented backup system (like Apple’s Time Machine) is that it is historic – i.e you can recover earlier versions of files. RAID does’t do that.
You're kind of comparing two different things, but, they are not mutually exclusive!! You can use your NAS RAID to do your Time Machine backup, this is what I do! Also, if you're backing up your NAS to an online service like BackBlaze (which you should if you care about the data!), they do indeed provide versioning.
OK, so the problem with RAID systems is that you’ve got identical drives, used identically and with identical mean times to failure.
But not really, even with the steep bathtub curves at point of failure, it's still hundreds of hours between drives failing. I bought a job lot of identical drives about 5 years ago, one of the original batch failed autumn 23. Nothing else has even reported a bad sector.
(I've also protected myself by getting a second NAS when the first was almost full and buying another job lot of drives (same capacity, different manufacturer) and swapped a few in and out.)
I've got anything that's truly irreplaceable on cloud as well as multiple backups.
you can recover earlier versions of files. RAID does’t do that..
..but Synology HyperbackUp does. It's a standard package on a synology NAS
Another point of a properly implemented backup system (like Apple’s Time Machine) is that it is historic – i.e you can recover earlier versions of files. RAID does’t do that.
Yes and no, ZFS has snapshots built in, so while it's not as granular as Time Machine, you can revert to data as it was yesterday if you find all your files encrypted by ransomware. However it's not really the same thing, it's perfectly possible for a RAID based data store to then offer storage for Time Machine to do its backups onto.
Pro’s of JBOD
If you lose one drive you only lose a fraction of the data, not everything on the server.
Yeah, but you've definitely lost that data, I take your point about multiple drive failure, though I disagree with you about how likely it is. But at least with RAID you've got a fighting chance to restore it. If you're really paranoid, buy discs from different batches and / or run with more than a single drive of redundancy.
Either way it's not infaliable and nothing should be your only copy of irriplacable important data. Three copies in at least two locations is generally a good rule of thumb.
There's a lot of solutions being offered here but not much in the way of questions.
What are you trying to achieve here exactly? Is it solely for backup or do you want other functionality? What are you protecting against? How much data are we talking? How many devices?
If you're just wanting to back up half a dozen Word documents and iPhone photos of your dog, you can do that with a pendrive.
2. Multiple drive failures, which can be protected against with RAID 5 and enough discs.
Incorrect. RAID5 can suffer a single drive failure (and is increasingly becoming non-viable due to rebuild times on large arrays). RAID6 can suffer two.
The elephant in the room here is, does it matter? You're not running a datacentre. If you have a single disk to backup to and it explodes, well so what, just replace it, you've still got the original data.
Not really a fan of the “manual-backup-to-USB-drive-and-stash-it-somewhere” option!!
It's what I do. Anything I care about is on a hard drive in a drawer at my mum's.
If your only backup solution is a permanently live NAS and/or permanently online cloud storage and you get hit by ransomware then you're bollocksed anyway regardless of how many disks you've thrown at it because it'll munch all your backups before you've even noticed you're infected.
RAID is not backup. RAID is availability.
Yes understanding what you want and each part what a NAS can provide is important.
1. NAS: do you want your storage attached to the network so that multiple devices can access it?
2. In the event of someone pouring a cup of coffee into your NAS, would you regret the loss of data? If Y back it up to a USB drive.
3. In the event of a fire or flood or something, would you regret the loss of data? If Y backup to the cloud.
4. If a drive fails, do you need to get access to the data on it really quickly? If Y then set up RAID and have a spare drive or 2 sat on the shelf.
I do 1-3. 4 is for professional photographers/musicians etc, geeks, and IT departments.
In your position I’d consider iCloud and a USB pen for your laptop. I’ve got autobackups from our iPhones to my NAS but it’s a faff to set up and not as reliable as iCloud so I do both (just in case I ever move from Apple).
RAID is availability.
I mean I did literally say that a couple of lines above the part of my post that you quoted 🙂
Possibly I'm being naive but I don't think Ransomware is that relevant of an issue* - If you keep everything up-to-date (which I do) and don't open random apps downloaded from pr0n websites or emails (which I don't) then the number of viable attack vectors are extremely minimal. YMMV. And everything is versioned & backed up to BackBlaze anyway (note: cloud backup is a totally distinct thing to cloud storage) so un-corrupted files could be retrieved even if the most recent backup somehow became affected.
The problem with off-site USB backups is, how often do you actually bother to do it. Be honest. 🙂
(*although I guess it only takes one slip-up)
I mean I did literally say that a couple of lines above the part of my post that you quoted
I was confirming, not arguing. (Unusual, I know.)
Possibly I’m being naive but I don’t think Ransomware is that relevant of an issue*
Probably not. But that was my point, what are you guarding against, what's the problem that this boil-in-the-bag solution is addressing? A local NAS is of no use if your house burns down, but if your house burns down then is your first concern going to be a copy of that letter you wrote to the council ten years ago?
The problem with off-site USB backups is, how often do you actually bother to do it. Be honest.
Probably not as often as I should, wholly predictably. But I'm aware that any deficit here is my own monkey, and I can probably survive without the last few months' worth of photos of the cats. The drive-in-a-drawer is my "everything's gone to shit" get out of jail free card.
Plus that's not my only backup, I have stuff syncing variously to Google's and Microsoft's online storage. Every contact, calendar event, birthday, notes I've ever written* that actually matter are all in the cloud. Phone photos get copied across to the PC periodically, the minitower next to my right knee is a NAS / network server in all but name. It is, I admit, a haphazard approach and there is almost certainly room for improvement. But for my own personal specific use case, it is sufficient and it works. The OP's use case could be wholly different.
(* - OneNote is the greatest product MS ever created and this is a hill I will choose to die on. It is a backup copy of my brain, it holds everything from mortgage details to chickenless noodle soup recipes. If that ever fails it'd be like developing sudden onset Alzheimer's, I'd be royally screwed.)
Use is two fold 1. Extended storage space and 2. enable back up.
data is photos/word/excel/phone storage and back ups.
I was using a USB drive but a 3.5in, not a pen one- have a lot of pictures so use a external hard disk for picture storage (not just back up) and need more than a few hundred gb of storage. Before getting a ssd or another traditional drive i wondered what the options were. The other problem with the usb drive is remembering to plug it in to the laptop and doing a back up. Automating would help ensure there is an up to date back up.
Nas or cloud also provides more convenience than an external drive for storing stuff in the first place
For the phone I’ve just gone for icloud for ease and automation and to enable the phone clone and wife can use for her phone back up too. Haven’t included pictures in this so still need something to store and back these up.
If I use an old PC, does that need to be running Windows 10 (Windows 11 from October 2025) to ensure that I don't leave my network and data that it is storing, open to external 'attack' or do you run linux or something on it?
I have an old laptop that was running windows 10 out of the box but was cheap and so was too slow to actually run it (albeit this might mean it's too slow to operate the NAS fast enough even if I swap Windows for linux - assuming that is possible) - I'd be restricted to USB drives too which would restrict speed too so might not be the most optimal speed wise.
mert
But not really, even with the steep bathtub curves at point of failure, it’s still hundreds of hours between drives failing. I bought a job lot of identical drives about 5 years ago, one of the original batch failed autumn 23. Nothing else has even reported a bad sector.
(I’ve also protected myself by getting a second NAS when the first was almost full and buying another job lot of drives (same capacity, different manufacturer) and swapped a few in and out.)
I’ve got anything that’s truly irreplaceable on cloud as well as multiple backups.
I worked at a startup in the pre-cloud days managing some large datasets for about 5 years, and I saw it happen a few times. All enterprise quality gear, multiple MSA1000s chained together containing ultra 3 drives, etc (showing my age a there a bit).
I was never 100% sure though, if it was because all the drives were from a single batch, or if it was actually the extra workload from the resilver that caused the failure (even then, a large RAID 5/6 recovery really thrashed the disks for many hours and it's far worse today with the huge disks available - taking days even).
@Cougar I have a similar mac-based approach with shared recipe book, house documents and passwords for all the household stuff. If I were to die tomorrow Mrs S could still operate the tech albeit after a steep learning curve as I am domestic IT implementation and support.
EDIT Shared shopping lists have been a godsend, once we had some training (that's both of us).
We had this at work recently. Server dropped a drive then immediately a second went during the rebuild. We have 4 Tb NAS Raid 5 I think, so data was all there.
Solution now, new server (They cost a few bob now!) and a second NAS (Qnap) Server backed up onto both every night. The server also has its own drive of its OS so if that drive goes it should still be recoverable from a backup on the two NAS. At least that's how they told me it is supposed to work.. They STILL want me to get cloud storage on top of that..
Note the NAS drives and the server are in different places not all in the same building.
I worked at a startup in the pre-cloud days managing some large datasets for about 5 years, and I saw it happen a few times. All enterprise quality gear, multiple MSA1000s chained together containing ultra 3 drives, etc (showing my age a there a bit).
I was never 100% sure though, if it was because all the drives were from a single batch, or if it was actually the extra workload from the resilver that caused the failure (even then, a large RAID 5/6 recovery really thrashed the disks for many hours and it’s far worse today with the huge disks available – taking days even).
Cross out "startup" and my experiences are identical, right down to the MSA1000s. Manglement used to use the 'lightning striking twice' argument but the fact of the matter was that once one drive failed, the chances of the others thinking it was a party and joining in was actually quite high. At the time I put it down to them all being the same batch/age/wear. As you say, this is enterprise-grade stuff not some budget SATA drive where they've taken off the blue label and stuck on a red one with "NAS" written on it, they should be able to take a beating (though "should" is doing some heavy lifting here).
I've rebuilt more than one RAID stack from scratch due to "yeah, we'll order a replacement drive next month... oh, oops." And I touched on this earlier but you're bang on, RAID5 is no longer fit for purpose for large arrays even with proper hardware caching RAID controllers let alone FakeRAID in a consumer NAS.
We had this at work recently. Server dropped a drive then immediately a second went during the rebuild. We have 4 Tb NAS Raid 5 I think, so data was all there.
That's not RAID5 unless it was disk failure in two separate arrays. RAID6 maybe.
EDIT Shared shopping lists have been a godsend, once we had some training (that’s both of us).
"Alexa, add bread to the shopping list."
If I use an old PC, does that need to be running Windows 10 (Windows 11 from October 2025) to ensure that I don’t leave my network and data that it is storing, open to external ‘attack’ or do you run linux or something on it?
I looked into this years ago when our SAN exploded. There are a number of Linux-based distros specifically designed to be NAS controllers (the off-the-shelf Synology etc home solutions probably run some form of Linux anyway). I think it was FreeNAS I was playing with, it used the ZFS file system and ZFS requires an absolute boatload of RAM, far more than I had at my disposal.
But, yes. It's certainly doable with Linux, but whether it's doable today on something underpowered isn't my wheelhouse so I'll have to defer to the Linux spods on here.
That said, you shouldn't need a "controller" at all if you're just buying a NAS and a couple of drives.
I use my NAS pretty heavily, considering I'm not an IT professional - a cougar said, it depends on what you want it to do, and how much data you are taking about.
If all you want to do is back up a couple of laptops/phones automatically (ie: without having to remember to plug them in), and some shared file storage, then a basic Synology or QNAP is all you need - just pick the number of bays that you need for storage and for parity.
I've had a couple of synology's, and they have been great - I'd hesitate to say idiot-proof, but as close as you will get. They come with a really good suite of apps to manage more or less everything you want to do. Very much an "it just works" experience.
If you use Synology's hybrid RAID, you can also use whatever drives you might have lying around (or are on sale), they don't need to match.
For backing up your NAS - Synology will also do that for you to their cloud (it costs), as will a number of other cloud providers (which can be managed with the Synology app). Just think about what you need to back-up, vs what perhaps you don't need to - but that's only a consideration when you get to multiple TB, and cost becomes a significant consideration
The only reasons I upgraded to a home-made NAS/Raid is that I use mine as a media-server, and so needed more storage bays, and a more powerful processor to deal with serving higher quality content.
For most people, Synology is an excellent solution - particularly have a look at their new bee-link range, which I think is focused on domestic users.
I have two QNAP NAS servers. One is at home and the other is at my work office on the totally independent guest network (my work are fine with this as it has no connection to the internal network).
I use the Rsync feature to synchronise from the home device to the work device and so have geographically separate copies of the data. With this typeof solution the second destination could be a friend or relatives house.
Just one disk in each NAS as I thought RAID did not really offer much benefit.
“Alexa, add bread to the shopping list.”
That's ok until I pop my head around the front door and add 192 toilet rolls to your shopping.
If you're vaguely computer literate, have a look at signing up for ans AWS account and setting up an S3 folder to drag and drop stuff manually if y9u want an additional storage outlet. Unless you're into a large number of files it might even be free.