Synology RAID options

DoubleCheese · 9 Jun 2014 at 11:23

I've just bought a 2 bay Synology NAS, DS214+ and a pair of WD Red 3TB drives. I was wondering how I'd set up the drives as RAID1, 0 or JBOD.

I understand RAID1 would give me redundancy, but if an important file was deleted how quickly would it be deleted off the second disc? I assume it's instantaneous? Or does the second disc keep versions of the first so I could go back and recover a file?

Thanks.

rpstewart · 9 Jun 2014 at 12:01

RAID1 is an instantaneous mirror. The array won't report an operation as complete until it has been done on both disks. Therefore if you delete something it's gone.

This is why RAID is described as a redundancy / availability solution rather than a backup.

BinnsY · 9 Jun 2014 at 21:25

The idea of RAID1 is that you still have a copy of all your files should one of the drives in the array fail. As stated above it's not a backup solution as it wont protect you from manually deleting the files.

In terms of which RAID option you want to use it really depends what your are planning to do with the NAS and how your wider backup picture looks.

DoubleCheese · 10 Jun 2014 at 11:45

Thanks for the replies. It'll be used to serve some media to laptops and phones in the house and hold a copy of my Lightroom database. I'd like to be able to backup my phone photos to the drive as well and desktop and a couple of laptops.

Looking at an offsite backup solution too. Any recommendations?

welshdragon · 10 Jun 2014 at 16:03

Heard good things about SYMFORM for offsite storage

If you contribute some storage you get storage off site in return for free, but you start with 10gig free anyway. Think there's an app on the synology app store too.

Or there's crashplan.

I use Onedrive as my phones have the app and I had a shed load of free storage