Experience with the bottom end NAS range?

leezer3

leezer3

leezer3

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After an hour long phone call with my father (PC broken, nothing backed up....), I'm looking to try and install a set and forget system that backs up his entire business documents folder with no user interaction.

I personally run a Debian server plus BackupPC, but this is quite blatantly overkill for his needs, and so I've been looking at the bottom of the range NAS boxes available.

These are the features needed:
Automatic backup, anything manual can and will get forgotten :rolleyes:
Max of 500gb space- Most appear to be diskless and I can easily pull something out of my spares box.
Reliable- This *has* to be a zero user interaction box.

Anyone have any recent experience with the bottom of the range NAS systems?
Synology's Data Replicator looks like it would do the business, but I'm very wary of marketing.

Not overly worried about noise or file versioning, these are nice to have but not something he's about to pay for, however sensible that might be....
(The initial suggestion was to buy another USB key and 'try' to remember to backup, not helpful when he wanted files he'd worked on today on an emergency basis....)

-Leezer-
 
I've been using a Synology DS213+ for two years, and yeah, they are pretty idiot proof. I do not know about the backup stuff, I use mine just for media storage and streaming, but it's been solid, and frankly quite easy to use.

I also use their Android DSM to connect via my mobile. That's nice, although I'm not sure you'd want your business data streamed via a server somewhere. But, it's there.

TL;DR version, I have no complains. It does what it's suppose to do, does it well, it's easy to use, and has lots of features. If you are more tech savvy, you know what you want and don't want, and it's for someone who isn't, then the Synology stuff is well worth a look IMO.
 
Synology/QNAP have been solid for me - before that I had a few adventures with trying to do it really cheap - icy box, verbatim, etc... its really not worth it - some of them worked but were just too feature light, others would randomly lose files or the whole disc or just stopped working entirely within a short space of time.
 
Rroff said:
Synology/QNAP have been solid for me - before that I had a few adventures with trying to do it really cheap - icy box, verbatim, etc... its really not worth it - some of them worked but were just too feature light, others would randomly lose files or the whole disc or just stopped working entirely within a short space of time.
Click to expand...

See, the randomly loosing files/ disk is what I'm worried about :(
I suppose I can setup FreefileSync or Synctoy if the NAS doesn't support file backups natively, but I won't have regular access to this, and it needs to be bulletproof.
No random reboots, no dropping off, no errors just works.....

Features simply aren't needed in this situation, and in some ways they're likely to be unhelpful.

-Leezer-
 
I've never had any issues with Synology low or high end (always been solid for me). But its definitely not worth going for the really cheap mainstream brand solutions IMO.


One thing I've found really useful with my NAS is the realtime USB replication (everything written to the internal drive is software mirrored to a connected USB2 disc) and USB copy - so I can easily rotate out offline copies of the internal NAS drive(s) to keep "offsite".
 
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How about a cloud based solution for him? Something like Crashplan runs pretty silently and after the initial backup you don't really notice it at all.

I have crashplan backing up to their own servers and my own synology diskstation (as well as some incoming backups from work. As far as the device itself, I stumbled into synology stuff last year and its been great. Now all my media sits on it and sharing is so much better. Its easy to setup and administer both locally and remotly through the web interface. Wish I'd got one years ago tbh.
 
As peige says something like Crashplan or Backblaze would fit exactly your father's needs exactly.

Pick the folders you want to backup and then just let it continuously backup silently in the background. For ~$5/month it's well worth the money
 
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Have a look at Create Synchonicity for a free backup option - I've used it for a couple of years to back up 3 PC's to my NAS. It's very light, and can either be manually triggered or on a schedule, and will catch up on backups that were missed due to the PC being off etc.
 
I'd actually already ruled out online backup services, should have mentioned that...

Being in the sticks, all he gets is an unreliable 2mb at best, and it has a habit of falling over whenever the weather is bad.
I know a NAS isn't fireproof (sadly), but frankly that's the least of my worries at the minute.

Looking rather like the bottom of the range Synology at the minute.

-Leezer-
 
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