Synology DS713 - Correct usage?

[Adnams Drinker]

We have a pair of Synology DS713+ enclosures that we use for storing all the artwork files etc for current/live jobs within the office. DS1 - the actual 'work' drive - backs itself up to DS2 at 9pm every night.

We had a bit of a scare overnight when DS1 disappeared from the network and from the Synology admin console, but it turns out it just needed a reboot and all is now well again.

My question is this - what is considered the 'correct' usage of a NAS such as this? Currently, we all work on DS1 directly ie. artwork files and assets are created/saved directly on DS1. Is working directly on the drive like this advisable or should we be working on jobs on our individual iMacs and then copying the files over to the NAS? If it's relevant, there are six of us using DS1 from within the office on a daily basis.

Various people within the building seem to have varying opinions on the matter, but I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of those with more experience of these devices.

 

[Armageus]

There isn't really a "correct" way as such, but personally I would work direct from the NAS - the reason being you reduce the risk of the "current" work files being overwritten with an older one than people have had on their computer, and then not put back.

Nas'es are designed to be accessed by more than one person - so not an issue for 6 people to work directly on it.

Having a 2nd NAS provides a form of backup (and also the option to run everything from that in the event that the 1st fails - i.e. improved availability), but do you have any other backups? Think about cases where a file is corrupted or accidentally deleted - if the 2nd NAS backs up daily, you have no way of going back far enough to recover it.

 

[Adnams Drinker]

Funny you should ask about the backup - in light of what happened overnight, we're going to look into having DS2 exactly mirror DS1 at all times (assuming that's possible with these) and then purchase a third Synology enclosure that will take an automated nightly backup of DS1 ... is that the sort of thing you mean?

 

[Armageus]

That would give you instant failover i.e. if DS1 failed - point everything to DS2

but DS3 would surely still only be backup of data as of yesterday.

If someone deleted something 3 days ago but you don't notice until today, yesterdays nightly backup will not contain that.

At work most of our recovery plan is as follows:

Each essential business function e.g. Database, File Server is mirrored across 2 servers
- this gives us high availability by failing over to the 2nd server.

- we have a NAS then performs a once weekly backup of almost everything
- we have a 2nd NAS that stores a weeks worth of daily backups of essential files (copies of daily database backups, source code - i.e. anything that changes regularly or is business critical if it was lost)

- the daily essentials backups are also backed up Monday-Friday to 128GB USB3.0 Flash drives, 1 for each day of the week and taken off-site.

 

[visibleman]

Synology supports (iirc) version control with backups, so i'd employ that on the third storage device.

However, as it sounds like everything is stored in the same location, i would personally deploy an offsite backup solution (with version control) instead of sticking in another storage device along side the current Synology boxes.