Talk to me about NAS choices and also analyse my backup regime/advice to improve it

antc

antc

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I have an ageing Drobo FS which was discontinued a fair while ago. It has a bunch of smaller random drives in it and it I'm honest its been reliable if slow. Also, My reason for thinking of changing out the drobo is also as I get more critical data on board, the proprietary format of the "raid" used worries me.

I am looking now at my storage options and thinking a new NAS maybe in order. I have been reading a fair few threads on here and researching on the internet and the two that seem to come out top are QNAP and Synology.

What has promoted me into looking at this was doing a fresh install of Yosemite on my mac over the bank holiday weekend. Currently my backup/storage regime is as follows -

IMAC 2tb internal ------------> TM 2tb external
photos library ------------> 1tb external (ext1) via chronosync
photos library ------------> 1tb external (ext 2) via chronosync
Docs/music/films ------------> 1tb external (ext3) via chronosync

Now I had thoughts of adding another external 2tb and adding it as a second TM drive which I would then configure to sync to alternate drives on alternate days. BUT, this is adding yet another external drive to the collection and I guess I already have the 4 listed above plus one spare, plus my drobo I don't really use too much as its a bit slow.

So, in essence, I guess I am asking for your thoughts on the follows -

1. What NAS would you buy now with around a £500 budget (not including drives)
2. Would you simplify the backup regime

Any other advice you have would be appreciated, I have looked and read about a lot of things today and would be good to get other opinions. As for drives for the new NAS, I am thinking WD red drives.

Thanks in advance.
 
i worked in IT for 8 years specifically on storage both tech support, sales and R&D and in particular NAS enclosures, working closely with drobo, promise, qnap, thecus, netgear, synology, infortrend etc etc.
yes the drobo is a bit of a slow unit and the drobo raid is a funny old thing, its improved considerably from the original models which were dreadfully slow with a clunky GUI.
for the money ( at a push i would buy Infortrend each and every time. They are a high quality Pro NAS and with far less gimmicks than thecus, synology and QNAP have. if your not interested in a ton of plugins addons and features you would most likely never use then the Infortrend is ideal.
one advanatge of the EonNAs is it uses Oracle ZFS file system rather than linus based ZFS that other NAS units use. this means as well as much better security , more importatnly it has built in self heal and dedupe features. to prevent corrupt files.
also included is WORM. write once read many. this means files are protected and cannot be deleted for a set period of time you specify. one touch backups to and from external drives via the esata, usb 2 and usb 3 ports as well as sync backups and remote replication. all great functions for backing up data.

saying all that it is slower than the synolgy but for a single user backing up images that isnt going to make a huge difference ( more so if multiple users are accessing the data simultaneously.

So in terms of synology and qnap the two that spring to mind are the synology DS415Play ( around £370-400 ) or the QNAP TS-453 PRO ( around £400-430 ) ( i have an old synology 210J which i was given by them to play with and keep after finding a fatal flaw in there security at the time )
theres very little i can say about the qnap and synology, both are very similar with alot of similar preinstalled and 3rd party apps ( itunes, xbox, ps3, media server ,, torrents, the list is endless.

so 3 enclosures there . one thing to point out about the infortrend. they are like all 3 enclosures manufactured in china, however infortrend has UK offices ( in Basingstoke ) which i have vistied several times and there customer support is second to none. both synology and qnap are a little trickier to deal with in that respect if you have a problem but both have good support forums.
also the infortrend may be a little harder to get hold of as most of there products are high end isci, SAS and fibre channel rack mount units that can cost several thousands upwards ( i sold, installed and setup 100TB of storage plus dedupe duplicate backup system worth over £260,000 ) to the Crown estate about 5 years ago and had 2 engineers from Infortrend along with me as part of the installation of 24 x 24 bay rack mounts . one heck of a job ). you can actually purchase direct from Infortrend UK as well.
 
Thanks Dean for a very detailed reply. I will take a look at all the systems you mention.
 
For non-rack mount units, I would highly suggest going with synology over qnap, I install them for NGOs sometimes and synology has always been leaps and bounds better in terms of hardware quality, interface and network compatibility, not to mention frequent updates.
 
I have a Synology DS214Play and DS414, I cannot recommend them highly enough! Excellent performance!

Bear in mind that with regards to the 214Play/415Play you pay a premium for the hardware transcoder, there are good other options such as the 414+ that are better VfM if you don't want or need the transcoder.
 
Currently have a Synology enclosure and a Qnap enclosure both using WD reds, so far no problems. Have a few minor niggles with the Qnap but the Synology box has done everything 1st time without having to spend hours searching Google for an answer. Agree with above statements about the Synology devices.
 
antc said:
IMAC 2tb internal ------------> TM 2tb external
photos library ------------> 1tb external (ext1) via chronosync
photos library ------------> 1tb external (ext 2) via chronosync
Docs/music/films ------------> 1tb external (ext3) via chronosync
Click to expand...

I cannot see how a single black box NAS RAID system can improve upon the OP's current backup system using 4 external hard drives.
 
redsnappa said:
I cannot see how a single black box NAS RAID system can improve upon the OP's current backup system using 4 external hard drives.
Click to expand...

Redsnappa, would you agree that my current setup is fairly robust then? What I have been thinking about since posting, is actually keeping the drobo and adding a copy of all my data to it.

As it is all photos/docs/music/films etc are backed up to my TM drive as well as the selection of various external drives. So I have multiple copies of my data which I guess is the best form of backup you can have. I would say its unlikely that 3 or 4 different drives will fail at the same time.

Lets me honest though, hard drives are always in two states aren't they, getting ready to fail, or failed.

I just wanted, obviously with help and advice from you guys to confirm that my regime was good, or if not then how it could be improved. I realise I put the title as talk to me about NAS, but thats because my original thought at the time was to replace my Drobo. I guess what maybe best is to just keep using it until I have some kinda issue with it, then think about changing it. I know also I said I was worried about the proprietary file format is uses, but at the end of the day if I have multiple copies of my data then it shouldn't matter to me if the Drobo or another drive fails.

I will edit the thread title.
 
Your current system is more fault tolerant than any single box Nas system can be. Multiple copies of your back up is far better than using a single device.
Typically a NAS box is powered on all the time, This is to allow for RAID parity check and RAID integrity checking and file system checking. This means the hard drive in a RAID system are worked much harder than a backup regime of multiple separate disks and are likely to fail more often. With your system of using multiple external disks, the disks that are not used in the current backup cannot fail as they are powered off.

antc said:
Lets me honest though, hard drives are always in two states aren't they, getting ready to fail, or failed.
Click to expand...
If the hard drives are not mistreated, there is usually more than 10,000 hours between the about to fail and the fail bit.
 
Lets me honest though, hard drives are always in two states aren't they, getting ready to fail, or failed.

i would actually say they are in two states of work or dead, failure rates on drives are around 1-2% though very little difference between seagate, WD, and Fujitsu drives ( Hitachi and tosiba were purchased by WD and Seagate ).
at one time or another all brands have had a duff range ( seagate ES1 with the messed up firmware, WD green rev 1 etc ).

in 8 years ( and about 1 million hard drives ) it was very rare to actually get one that was in the stage of failing ( bad sectors aside which drives have areas wrote in to to allow for x amount ) most drives tended to go from a working state to a dead state with very little warning. ( rather inconsiderate of them tbh )
 
I have a DS414 with 3*4TB drives in it and setup as SHR RAID which gives me one disk redundancy in the event of a failure. The whole lot is backed up to Crashplan in the cloud in case of a catastrophe.

Works perfectly so far but I havent had a failure yet!!
 
If the data is important, always have multiple copies on physically separate devices. I have learned this the hard way. Have seen a few folks who have wished that they had taken the time to make a backup. Another good tip is to make sure your can restore from your backups. I recently got burned when trying to restore a mysql DB and found out that my backups were corrupt, luckily I did find one, but still lost 3 months worth of posts.
 
Absolutely spot on point about being able to restore from backups. They are pretty useless if you can't restore from them!
 
antc said:
would you agree that my current setup is fairly robust then?.
...
I would say its unlikely that 3 or 4 different drives will fail at the same time.
Click to expand...
I'd suggest it depends where those 3 or 4 drives are physically located. If they're all in the same location, a simple house fire will take them all out. But if they're not all in the same location, you'll need a more sophisticated strategy to cope with the fact that they won't all be identical.

I have one drive running daily backups in the office and one drive running daily backups at home, and every Friday I rotate them. In the worst reasonable case I lose four days' worth of stuff from either home or work but not both, and I think that's a reasonable risk/effort ratio.
 
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Hi Stewart, point taken regarding location although I done have much of a choice on that one as I don't have an alternate location offsite I could store a drive or two.

I have just yesterday made a final decision on my new backup solution which is as follows -

IMAC 2tb internal ---------> TM 2tb external (desktop drive) (Hourly backup)
---------> TM2 2tb external (desktop drive) (Hourly backup)

Photo Library---------> 2tb external via chronosync (portable) (Hourly backup)
---------> 2tb external via chronosync (portable) (Hourly backup)

Docs/music/movies---> 1tb external via chronosync (desktop drive)

I will then add a copy of the photos/Docs/music/movies to my drobo too. Drobo will be a monthly backup.

I then have multiple copied of everything. There may come a time soon where I can keep a drive in the office at work. I could then take out 1xtm and 1xphoto backup and rotate them weekly. But thats not an option yet. All I can do really is have multiple copies of the data on multiple drives, its highly unlikely they will all fail at once.

Time machine backs up everything. Then obviously the other drives backup either just photos or just docs. I think I am about as well covered as I can be. Only other possible way to add further resilience I can think is some form of cloud backup. But if I am honest, not sure how much I trust cloud backups.
 
dean messenger said:
one advanatge of the EonNAs is it uses Oracle ZFS file system rather than linus based ZFS that other NAS units use. this means as well as much better security , more importatnly it has built in self heal and dedupe features. to prevent corrupt files.
also included is WORM. write once read many. this means files are protected and cannot be deleted for a set period of time you specify. one touch backups to and from external drives via the esata, usb 2 and usb 3 ports as well as sync backups and remote replication. all great functions for backing up data.
Click to expand...


The Linux based consumer grade NASes generally don't use ZFS at all, usually just mdadm. I'm using Zol (ZFS on Linux) quite happily.
 
antc said:
Hi Stewart, point taken regarding location although I done have much of a choice on that one as I don't have an alternate location offsite I could store a drive or two.
Click to expand...

Your car can count as offsite.... !!!! stick it in a padded box.... & switch regulary...
 
Offsite, offsite, offsite - having a robust backup strategy is negated by (as mentioned) a house fire or burglary if you're not storing data offsite too.

I fell into the trap of fretting over thinking I needed a NAS which was on all the time and backing up constantly - when I realised that my critical data isn't changing that frequently, I came to the conclusion that multiple external USB drives would be a better solution for me - because I can store one in the drawer at work and until I actually changed something that wasn't already stored in the cloud (Dropbox, gmail, iCloud data etc.) that backup was still perfectly valid.

Obviously depends on use case - I use my Mac fairly infrequently now as I prefer to sit/lounge with an iPad for most things - only turning the Mac on once or twice a week and even then, the data I do back up to the external USB drive (music and photos) doesn't change that much.

Your data may be changing all the time - but it is worth thinking about how frequently and how much of it it does change.
 
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antc said:
I have just yesterday made a final decision on my new backup solution.... multiple copies of the data on multiple drives, its highly unlikely they will all fail at once.
Click to expand...
I think that's really dumb.

To be honest - and I'm sorry if this hurts, but I think it needs to be said - it sounds like you've tried to design a clever clever backup strategy that you can boast about, rather than make a realistic assessment of the value of your data and how best to protect it.

Look, I own and run a business with £1 million turnover and my backup strategy is much less 'sophisticated' than yours. But if my office burns down, worst case I lose 4 days worth of data because I have that off-site backup. Presumably your data is much more valuable than mine because you feel the need to back it up hourly rather than daily. And yet if your house burns down you will lose absolutely everything.

You say that you don't have an off-site option but that's absolute rubbish. It really is. Do you have a shed? A car? Any friends or relatives or neighbours locally who could look after a drive for you? You can rent a tiny amount of space in a self storage place for peanuts. You could even post a backup drive to yourself, and if you don't put any stamps on it the post office will keep it safe for you for 3 weeks. Collect it from the sorting office weekly and post another drive, and it will cost you maybe £2 per week.

So - think through how much data you can afford to lose if your house burns down, and design your off-site backup strategy accordingly. If the answer really is 'none', then invest in a decent broadband link and back it all up in the cloud via Crashplan or one of those services. But *don't* say you don't have any off-site options.
 
StewartR said:
I think that's really dumb.

To be honest - and I'm sorry if this hurts, but I think it needs to be said - it sounds like you've tried to design a clever clever backup strategy that you can boast about, rather than make a realistic assessment of the value of your data and how best to protect it.

Look, I own and run a business with £1 million turnover and my backup strategy is much less 'sophisticated' than yours. But if my office burns down, worst case I lose 4 days worth of data because I have that off-site backup. Presumably your data is much more valuable than mine because you feel the need to back it up hourly rather than daily. And yet if your house burns down you will lose absolutely everything.

You say that you don't have an off-site option but that's absolute rubbish. It really is. Do you have a shed? A car? Any friends or relatives or neighbours locally who could look after a drive for you? You can rent a tiny amount of space in a self storage place for peanuts. You could even post a backup drive to yourself, and if you don't put any stamps on it the post office will keep it safe for you for 3 weeks. Collect it from the sorting office weekly and post another drive, and it will cost you maybe £2 per week.

So - think through how much data you can afford to lose if your house burns down, and design your off-site backup strategy accordingly. If the answer really is 'none', then invest in a decent broadband link and back it all up in the cloud via Crashplan or one of those services. But *don't* say you don't have any off-site options.
Click to expand...

totally agree, I have back to NAS and external, and then a weekly backup to external that lives in the car.

Works for me.

Everything will fail at some point :)
 
Backup is extremely important and to make it worthwhile, it needs to be off-site.

Mine consists of 3 copies of data: PC -> NAS -> Cloud

Both the Synology and Qnap have apps you can install form Amazon, iDrive, Livedrive, Dropbox etc. The app takes the hassle away by allowing you to configure your backup to the Cloud so it happens at regular intervals in the background.

Once uploaded to the cloud, not only can you restore it but you can also log in and browse your content in the cloud.

Another complimentary option (i.e. in addition to the above) is to backup your photos onto an external hard drive. As they fill up, label and file them. Lightroon can keep track of these hard drives, allowing you to browse the thumbnails and then if you want access to the original file, just plug the relevant external drive in and lightroom will access it.
 
Not sure I like the car option. Vibration, extremes of temperature plus if your home is broken into at a time your car is at home, it's possible the culprits might use your car as the getaway vehicle.

You could just encrypt your backup disks and ask any random Joe to look after it for you, even if it's for a small monthly fee or whatever.
 
There is valuable and valuable, if its that bad, take out huge insurance and a vault safe.

What about if your friend joe is carrying it home, gets knocked over, a dog grabs it runs, jumps in the sea with it. Then its hit by a speedboat etc etc.
 
I think the "simple" house fire is vastly over rated compared with the certainty of your hard drives failing.

As for leaving a copy in your car, if the car doesn't get nicked, there are more than half as many car fires as house fires and much more chance of it completely burning out!

I think you are right to decide on multiple copies, but even I wouldn't keep them in the same room:eek:
 
StewartR said:
I think that's really dumb.

To be honest - and I'm sorry if this hurts, but I think it needs to be said - it sounds like you've tried to design a clever clever backup strategy that you can boast about, rather than make a realistic assessment of the value of your data and how best to protect it.

Look, I own and run a business with £1 million turnover and my backup strategy is much less 'sophisticated' than yours. But if my office burns down, worst case I lose 4 days worth of data because I have that off-site backup. Presumably your data is much more valuable than mine because you feel the need to back it up hourly rather than daily. And yet if your house burns down you will lose absolutely everything.

You say that you don't have an off-site option but that's absolute rubbish. It really is. Do you have a shed? A car? Any friends or relatives or neighbours locally who could look after a drive for you? You can rent a tiny amount of space in a self storage place for peanuts. You could even post a backup drive to yourself, and if you don't put any stamps on it the post office will keep it safe for you for 3 weeks. Collect it from the sorting office weekly and post another drive, and it will cost you maybe £2 per week.

So - think through how much data you can afford to lose if your house burns down, and design your off-site backup strategy accordingly. If the answer really is 'none', then invest in a decent broadband link and back it all up in the cloud via Crashplan or one of those services. But *don't* say you don't have any off-site options.
Click to expand...

Well everyone is entitled to their opinion pal.

I haven't tried to design anything clever, what I have done it use the technology I have at my disposal. Maybe Apple have designed a dumb system that backs up every hour? I think that comment was a little on the silly side if you ask me. No one creates a backup strategy to boast about or make them look clever, thats frankly absurd! People create backup strategies to keep their data as safe as they can.

So now thats out of the way, regarding leaving a hard drive in the car, as others have pointed out, extremes of temp, risk of fire, risk of break in, vibrations and shocks from driving around make it a total non starter. However, you mentioned shed, could be an option, I do have one, but extremes of temp i would worry about. Friend could be an option i guess. Sending the drive through the mail would be a non starter for me too, risk of damage, shocks etc, similar to my comments on leaving in the car. Not good conditions at all for drives to be constantly in a loop like that.

I did also mention in my previous post about looking into cloud backup options, this would of course represent on offsite option. I just need to understand more about this as regards to security of data. Be interesting to hear others thoughts on cloud backup.

Thanks for the comment though.
 
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