How much value do you place on the data on your external drives? If one dies and all the images are lost is this at all important?
With RAID the loss of a single drive does not result in any data being lost. That is the value of a RAID implementation. If done with a separate NAS box the data can be accessed by multiple computers. At my house there are two workstations and 4 laptops that are using the information on a single QNAP NAS,
With a 2-drive array you actually have 50% of the drive space available. With a 4-drive setup you lose 25% to the RAID overhead.
The Synology and QNAP NAS provides higher performance levels as they implement RAID in hardware instead of having the operating system do this in software. More expensive but greater performance and this also allows the use of slower (lower RPMs) and cooler and less noisy drives.
I have had a Drobo NAS for years. Very easy to manage, as the software basically does everything for you. Even adding/upgrading/replacing a drive is as simple as remove one and add one. But Drobo is no longer supported and is a proprietary system - so I've been nervous for quite a while.
I finally bought the bullet and bought a Synology NAS on Prime Day, when both the unit I bought and the hard drives were on very good sales. I did a lot of watching of this guy, and it was super helpful: https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceRexWill
He has tons of videos ranging from selecting a NAS, hard drive selection and initial setup. I followed his setup video from start to finish when I powered mine up for the first time. I bought the 5-bay 1522+ after lots of reading, and based on his recommendation bought 4 hard drives to set up initially. That leaves me one empty bay for future expansion at whatever size I decide.
Note that in my case, I use the NAS for local redundancy in the case of a drive failure. But I also have Backblaze as an online backup in the case of disaster (fire / tornado / etc).
I'm late to the party but I went down this road a while ago, wasted a bunch of money on a NAS, and now my NAS collects dust.
I was in the same boat, with several different hard drives totaling a relatively small storage amount (similar to 10TB in your case).
If your house burns down or another similar disaster strikes, it doesn't matter if you have one backup or a thousand, or a NAS or a RAID array, they are all gone anyway. Having multiple home backups is rather pointless in the era of dirt cheap unlimited cloud storage.
My strategy is one local backup (meaning my data exists in a total of 2 places locally) + safe cloud storage. Not only are high capacity hard drives ridiculously cheap these days, unlimited cloud storage is just a few dollars a month. Good quality 20TB hard drives are easily found under $300 if you're willing to wait for sales - smaller capacities are obviously even cheaper yet. So I just use a couple local backups, consolidating several small drives into a couple larger ones, and then cloud storage has me covered beyond that. I like using internal drives so that I am always getting maximum performance. I am using PCI 4.0 SSDs for all application and working drives.
I use Blackblaze for unlimited, safe and fully encrypted cloud storage and then a couple 10-20TB drives in my PC for the convenience of local backup + music, videos, PLEX, etc. In the unlikely event a drive fails, it doesn't matter, I just buy a new one and grab the data from the cloud or copy over from the other local backup drive. If something terrible happens and my entire computer is somehow destroyed or all HDDs fail simultaneously, also not a problem, I can just grab it from the cloud or have Blackblaze mail me a HDD with my data on it for free. There is just no need to have a bunch of HDDs anymore. There is no realistic scenario where I'm not 100% covered and there is no need for a NAS, RAID array, a PC tower full of HDDs, or even any real effort on my part at all in terms of data management. Even the cloud backup itself is completely automated and requires no input from me beyond a 2 minute initial setup. A niche case exception would be if you did not have access to fast or reliable internet service, then you would maybe want to focus more on local options.
If you're really worried, you can also copy your data to BluRays or Tapes and store them in different places such as bank safety deposit boxes. Personally I have no reason to go down that road. Also if you're an Amazon prime member you get unlimited cloud storage for photos (not videos) but it does support RAW file types, so that can be yet another free backup option if you want another layer of protection.
Mark, help me understand how cloud storage is so cheap. I am not finding it.
From Backblaze's website, the following: "Backing up your NAS to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is built for your budget. Save up to 80% off the price of Amazon AWS S3. Backblaze integrates with Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, and more so you can get started in minutes for just $6/TB/month. "
I have 4TB on my NAS... that is $24 per month x 12 = 288$ per year.
For that, I take a big spinner and every few months rotate it out at my Sister's house.
For me, unless I don't understand it, it is not cheap to use cloud storage as a back up.
Bruce, most folks talk Backblaze personal unlimited plan which is like $5-6/month. Of course this doesn't allow backing up your NAS but it does allow making a copy of all your files on your hard drive. There is versioning support also. The one you mentioned is a better plan as you backing up snapshots of your data but it is lot more expensive as you mentioned.
I had Bakcblaze personal for sometime but then I ran into issues where it says my files are backed up when they aren't. So in the end I cancelled my plan and went to iDrive. So far so good. I paid very little for first yr but this yr I will pay $199 for 10TB plan.
BTW - Does anyone have recommendations for 2 drive or multi drive DAS models? I have QNAP TR002 which are pretty old and work so far but I would think there is some better tech out there.
bobby350z wrote:
BTW - Does anyone have recommendations for 2 drive or multi drive DAS models? I have QNAP TR002 which are pretty old and work so far but I would think there is some better tech out there.
Bruce n Philly wrote:
Mark, help me understand how cloud storage is so cheap. I am not finding it.
From Backblaze's website, the following: "Backing up your NAS to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is built for your budget. Save up to 80% off the price of Amazon AWS S3. Backblaze integrates with Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, and more so you can get started in minutes for just $6/TB/month. "
I have 4TB on my NAS... that is $24 per month x 12 = 288$ per year.
For that, I take a big spinner and every few months rotate it out at my Sister's house.
For me, unless I don't understand it, it is not cheap to use cloud storage as a back up.
Regardless though, the reason to use cloud storage isn't solely about cost - it gives you the best possible failsafe that is completely separate from any local backup and immune to hardware failures. It's also automatic so there is no effort required on your part once set up. It's virtually impossible for you to lose your data with Blackblaze, to the point that if you did, there would probably be much worse problems to worry about haha. On top of this, it would have to fail simultaneously with your local backups for it to even be a problem if it did happen.
If you want, you can just copy your NAS to a local HDD and then back that up to Blackblaze, or pull the drives out and just use them in your PC as your NAS would not be needed if you switch to this strategy.
20TB Seagate EXOS enterprise-grade drives were $270 all last week and will likely be similarly cheap again around Christmas time.
Regarding a need for a NAS, as I noted earlier, I have a very digital home. Besides my main PC, I have a PC in home theater, a PC in my music workstation where I record from my keyboard, my wife has a PC, and I have a work laptop. I backup all these units to a common system, my NAS, on my network. Further, I play music and photos from my NAS to all the above.
For me, a NAS is really the only way to do it. I could take an old PC and make a server out of it... a NAS is really pretty much the same thing... but I like the utility, features and ease of a NAS.
Bruce n Philly wrote:
Interesting, I will look into it again.
Regarding a need for a NAS, as I noted earlier, I have a very digital home. Besides my main PC, I have a PC in home theater, a PC in my music workstation where I record from my keyboard, my wife has a PC, and I have a work laptop. I backup all these units to a common system, my NAS, on my network. Further, I play music and photos from my NAS to all the above.
For me, a NAS is really the only way to do it. I could take an old PC and make a server out of it... a NAS is really pretty much the same thing... but I like the utility, features and ease of a NAS.
The difference between our setups is I have one PC that stays on all the time with all my HDDs in it (doing the job of a NAS as well), and that is my Plex server along with everything else as it is connected to every room in my home. I prefer this approach as performance is much better than with a NAS, especially when there are media server duties involved such as transcoding or streaming certain lossless content to a Home Theater. For basic storage though it doesn't really matter which you use - whatever works.
The difference between our setups is I have one PC that stays on all the time with all my HDDs in it (doing the job of a NAS as well), and that is my Plex server along with everything else as it is connected to every room in my home. I prefer this approach as performance is much better than with a NAS, especially when there are media server duties involved such as transcoding or streaming certain lossless content to a Home Theater. For basic storage though it doesn't really matter which you use - whatever works.
I would never recommend a NAS as a place to store working files... performance would be horrendous.
You know, I totally forgot about a capability built into your home router.... a USB port. Most (all?) routers now have a USB port or two that where you can plug in a disk drive and share on the network... and even access from anywhere outside your home or office.
I never dicked with this capability as I wanted a RAID array with hot-swappable drives should one fail. This capability is for a single drive per USB port.
While reading up on the capabilities of these USB ports on my Asus router, I learned of another cool feature: I can plug my cell phone into the USB port and bring up my home network in the event of a cable failure. Cooool. I could have used this as I was down for days as a result of a lighting strike. I did use my cellphone to bring up my main PC, but had no idea I could bring up the whole network via the USB port on my router.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I will add this to see if it will help you. This works very well for me. I wind up with an on-site backup and a remote backup, both updated daily. I test the recovery process every several weeks just to make sure it works. I use 10 TB drives, but will probably move to either 14TB or 22TB relatively soon, as I am up around 7.1 TB usage right now. Total cost for this solution was around $1500, but drive prices have dropped since then. (Routers and switch were in the network already and are not included in the cost.)
Nice setup and backing up to your son's house... now that is a nice touch... excellent.
My setup... note PCs, hub, Router, and Modem are all 2.5G ethernet connections. Not really needed except great for machine-to-machine transfers.
My backups are all initiated by me (I love your automated setup) using FreeFileSync software to the Netgear NASs, then from there to a few super high capacity external spinners attached to one of my big PCs. I further clone all my PC's C drives each to an external SATA SSD each using Macrim free cloning software... in the event of a C drive failure, I can snap one of these clones in and bang, back up... since data is on another drive, all I need to do is run Windows updates.
Kudos to Asus as all routers that have "mesh" capability can be integrated into existing networks. Wow, nice. Used to be if you wanted interoperability, you needed all the same boxes.
