Synology & General HD/NAS Questions

Associate
Joined
15 Dec 2011
Posts
226
Hi Everyone,

Have had a Synology DS1815+ now for around 1.5 years - its where I store everything I own (digitally speaking).

My part OCD nature kicks in when I think about a few things and wanted to know what people thought:

  • I am out 7am-7pm most weekdays days either with work or after work things so NAS is sat on (at the moment) all this time with zero need for it to be ie I don't access it from work and no-one else in the house uses it.
  • My natural instinct would be to turn it off and turn back on when I want to use it or as a minimum have drives go into Hibernation
    • But I have been told by a few people that this can/does shorten the life of the drives as powering on and off whole NAS/drives waking up from hibernation puts added stress onto them.
      • Is this the case?
  • Very long story but I managed to get a lot of storage with the NAS when I got it - 8 x 8tb drives.
    • I am only using 5.5tb of the 41.8tb available after RAID etc
    • Should I take out the drives I don't need (after adjusting RAID config obviously) and leave them on the shelf?
      • Drives have 5 year warranty so not sure if its best to leave them running with a view that if they are going to go then best the go in warranty period - or is it best to leave powered off and limit the use/prolong the life?
      • Reduction in power use also a benefit I suppose
  • Suppose I am just interested in the views of Drive longevity in power managed world and also what you guys do.

Synology Backups.

Another question which is specific to Synlogy - How do you guys back up your synology?

Currently I have a USB drive (6tb) that I plug in and backup to - works fine - only issue is its not encrypted so if it fell into the wrong hands my data would be easily accessed - drive seems to have to be formatted EXT4 which I can browse using a linux utility on my windows box and restore files from there in the event NAS went boom or I deleted a file from NAS and recycle bin.

I have another NAS (Old WD one) - but it seems Synology only supports NAS2NAS backups if its another Synology ie you cant backup to a mapped drive - Something called RSync seems to exist but I havent had the time to look into this yet and I dont think the WD supports this anyway.

with my current data approaching 6tb which is capacity of the USB I am going to have to look at either multiple USB drives for different data or maybe getting another Synology and maybe taking couple of the drives out of this one (as above) and putting them in it.... Would much prefer to just sync to my WD though....

Anyway - appreciate the time for any views/opnions.

Cheers FS
 
Associate
Joined
31 Jan 2018
Posts
535
Location
Bury St Edmunds
On my synology ds210j there are offsite backup options such as amazon glacia and backblaze. There are a few other about, currently paying $22 a month to have my data offsite as well depending on how much you got to backup.

When I first got the device I was using Samsung disks which after 7 years were starting to fail being on 24/7 swapped them for some WD red drives.

I’ve seen on line a lot of people say to leave the. On rather than power cycling the drives.

Rsync is a great program that you could set up as a cron job to do the job on a schedule as it only copies differences and is really efficient.
 
Back
Top Bottom