I am planning on moving most of my data to an NAS drive, with an additional device for backup of the NAS and the pc system disk. I know I should consider off-site backup as well, but know I am not disciplined enough to do it. Started looking at a cheap WD My Cloud solution, but after a couple of days research I am thinking of going with Synology, looked at QNAP, but was put off after looking at their forum. Drobo doesn’t seem to get a lot of praise either compared to Synology. Haven’t really looked at others and don’t think I can be bothered with setting up a microserver.
There are couple of Pcs with SDD + HDDs that I would remove the hard disks from and put them in NAS . There is another PC that is used by my son that I may also move at some time. He plays games a lot so I am not sure how this will affect his response. He only has HDD so it may not make a lot of difference. It will be used as exclusively as file server and maybe streaming music. It may be possible that we will stream video, but that is not being done at the moment. One pc is backed up using Acronis to a separate HDD in the same machine.
Initially I am thinking of getting a Synology 4-bay unit (DS414j or DS415play) and 2 * 3G WD reds and using some 18 month old disks with 1 of the new WD reds. This would be 1TB WD Green, 2TB Seagate barracuda and 1 WD 3TB red in SHR, the equivalent of RAID 1. The other WD would be used to back up the existing data while setting up the NAS. I assume the disks would be configured as a single volume.
After that I would probably get another 4 bay Synology unit as an automatic backup device using another spare 2TB Seagate Barracuda + a WD 3TB Green as a basic volume, no RAID. Timed backup would seem to be ok for this, but I can’t find much detail on what it does or how it is configured. I guess it should be possible to isolate this device from the PCs to reduce the risk of ransomware on the PCs affecting the backup.
Once this was done I would add/replace disks with WD reds (at least 3TB) as additional storage as and when required. This would allow a spread of disks ages which should hopefully reduce the risk of 2 drives failing at the same time.
Currently 1 pc is backup up by Acronis, the other I do an infrequent copy so I would need to backup the system SDDs somewhere, but still considering what to do with about that.
Does this seem a workable, anything I should consider or do differently?
There are couple of Pcs with SDD + HDDs that I would remove the hard disks from and put them in NAS . There is another PC that is used by my son that I may also move at some time. He plays games a lot so I am not sure how this will affect his response. He only has HDD so it may not make a lot of difference. It will be used as exclusively as file server and maybe streaming music. It may be possible that we will stream video, but that is not being done at the moment. One pc is backed up using Acronis to a separate HDD in the same machine.
Initially I am thinking of getting a Synology 4-bay unit (DS414j or DS415play) and 2 * 3G WD reds and using some 18 month old disks with 1 of the new WD reds. This would be 1TB WD Green, 2TB Seagate barracuda and 1 WD 3TB red in SHR, the equivalent of RAID 1. The other WD would be used to back up the existing data while setting up the NAS. I assume the disks would be configured as a single volume.
After that I would probably get another 4 bay Synology unit as an automatic backup device using another spare 2TB Seagate Barracuda + a WD 3TB Green as a basic volume, no RAID. Timed backup would seem to be ok for this, but I can’t find much detail on what it does or how it is configured. I guess it should be possible to isolate this device from the PCs to reduce the risk of ransomware on the PCs affecting the backup.
Once this was done I would add/replace disks with WD reds (at least 3TB) as additional storage as and when required. This would allow a spread of disks ages which should hopefully reduce the risk of 2 drives failing at the same time.
Currently 1 pc is backup up by Acronis, the other I do an infrequent copy so I would need to backup the system SDDs somewhere, but still considering what to do with about that.
Does this seem a workable, anything I should consider or do differently?
