NAS - Advice please
 

I'm looking to install an NAS system for backing up our PC - we currently have something like 6 disks of various sorts with a max total capacity of circa 12TB - about 7TB of this is full.

Some of it is backed up to the cloud but I want/need a hard copy locally. W10 machine

NAS seems to be the best solution - any suggestions/thoughts?

I use WD books for my photography, similar to these below.
I have mine for photographs and have it set to raid, so a 12 TB system has 2 6TB drives and it backs up individually to both of them , so if you ever have a drive failure in it, the other one is still ok. I have them set for my photo storage so they go to them when downloaded off my camera. Or you can set them as a single drive, ie the full 12TB
There are plenty of makes, but I have always found Western Digital to be very good drives, so maybe I am a bit biased..

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb...BZ0000NCH-EESN

You will find they also do cheaper recertified ones that have been returned and they cannot sell as new, but that depends on availability

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb/c/recertified

They also do clearance which are older end of line models, such as

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb...BE0120JBK-EESN

You will also find them on Ebay that people have probably bought as the stock clearances etc and sell on at good prices.

Though I do not need the facility to connect the drive to the web, so I use the simple storage version, such as

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb...BE0160JBK-EESN

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-gb...BE0120JBK-EESN

We use a 4 bay Netgear NAS for pretty much the same thing & it's all straightforward / transparent. 4 bay because - 2 drives are for shared files on RAID 1 & the other 2 are for backup, again on RAID1, if it's only for backup a 2 bay would allow you to have RAID 1.

Netgear was chosen simply because all of the other network paraphernalia is Netgear & I image that most credible brands are fine. With some brands you can spec the drive size to suit at the point of purchase & some come with bundled backup software if that's relevant.

I use an Icy Box 2 bay raid USB3 enclosure to back up my photos, which I only run when I want to back up a batch of photos so no need for NAS. I am currently looking for more capacity and in the course of doing that I looked at a WD BookDuo but rejected that solution for a number of reasons. I use Raid 1 mirrored, so effectively double backed* up to mitigate against drive failure, this is set by physical dip switches on the Icy Box. On the WD you have to use the WD management software to set the raid you want to use and as far as I could see, you also had to use their encryption software, which reading the reviews would seem to have led to a number of people losing their data!

The only reason I can see for going for NAS rather than a USB is if you are backing up from multiple machines on your network. When I do eventually replace my backup system, it will be similar to the existing, nice and simple - two bay, Raid 1 set by dip switches and a USB 3 or 3.1 connection.

* If you include the HD drive in the PC with the photos on it, it is effectively a triple redundancy system :ok: which some of you out there might like.

The WD one I have you can open the top and swop the drives, I don't know if the encyption is written to the drive or not. I also installed my operating system on an SSD on the mobo and duplicated it to another drive that I disconnected, thus if ever needed I can boot from that.

I have two NASs on my home network: an old WD MyBookLive which the *DWO's laptop backs up to and a Buffalo NAS with RAID 1 mirrored for mine (RAID type is software configurable). I had the two original drives fail on the latter about a year apart causing major grief as the RAID hadn't recreated properly on the new drive - lesson learnt - I have now have the software perform a full integrity check fortnightly.

Advice I have been given is have a two tiered system one doing active backups and one long term storage copying the former to the latter at intervals.

I would suggest you need much more than 2x the required storage. Do a full backup at intervals and incrementals for new/modified files in between (I have actually configured mine to back up separate tranches of data in sequence because of runtime constraints), keeping a set number of copies of the full backup and deleting the oldest and incrementals which have been included in a full back up at least twice. If they are like mine the accompanying software will enable you to configure this fairly easily. I have run into issues with corrupted or incomplete backups in the past. I did experience a complete drive failure on my laptop when on holiday and with some fiddling was able to restore everything up to the point I left. I'm considering moving to one that uses SSD if I can get sufficient capacity at a reasonable cost.






*Domestic Warfare Officer

Thanks comrades - most useful! :ok: