NAS device for resilient storage?

DazedAndConfuzed

Afternoon all,

I'm looking for a resilient way to store multiple gig design drawings that ideally doesn't mean copying them between external hard drives. A Synology multi bay NAS drive has been recommended to me, is this the best option?

My concern is that if it's all on a hard drive and that goes pop then I've lost a load of time (and money!)'s worth of work.

Cheers

:beer:

DazedAndConfuzed

Second thought, is it worse getting a hard drive docking station and an internal hard drive over an external hard drive? Seems to be a cheaper option?

S0litaire

a NAS gives you the ability to add redundancy into the mix (2 mirrored drives should protect against hardware failure.

having a few external drives for backups is always a good idea.

I'm currently trying to build a NAS from scratch since I've got 2 SATA and 5 IDE drives laying around doing nothing but taking up room on my desk!

DazedAndConfuzed

S0litaire wrote: »

a NAS gives you the ability to add redundancy into the mix (2 mirrored drives should protect against hardware failure.

having a few external drives for backups is always a good idea.

I'm currently trying to build a NAS from scratch since I've got 2 SATA and 5 IDE drives laying around doing nothing but taking up room on my desk!

Cheers for your reply. So are you just getting an empty NAS box and putting the drives in?

S0litaire

I've got an dual core ATOM ION board sitting in a case doing nothing.

Trying to find a cheap 2 port IDE card for 4 of the older IDE drives (got a IDE to SATA connector for another.

Currently looking for and playing around with NAS software.

since I've got all the components it'd be a waste blowing £100 or so on a cheap box that only holds 2 drives

paddyrg

Not cheap, but have you considered online sync storage for whichever drawings are current? Means you get a copy on a server (or multiple servers) somewhere long, long away from your office just in case of meteor strike. Something like sugarsync, google drive, etc??

S0litaire

Just wondering how many GB? we talking about double or triple figures?

If it's double then Cloud solution might be cost effective.

If triple then good old fashioned hardware you can lug about in your bag might be better.

DazedAndConfuzed

At the moment they are between 15-25gb. I've got an ok internet connection at home but I can see uploading and downloading them should I need to make amendments might be a royal pain in the !!!!?

S0litaire

It can be a bit of a PITA. depends on how often you update.

The places like "DropBox" would be a pain since they tend to transfer the entire file back up with no revision control.

But something like SpiderOak has some version control. So set your drawing folder to backup and it's a large inital upload then after that it's only the changes to the file that are uploaded.

So you can actually go back through the history of a individual file and grab n pull down an earlier version.

But Spider Oak does costs a $100 (£64) per year for 100Gb unlimited users/computers.

I use it all the time bloody handy for backing up clients PC's before and after I attempt data/OS repairs (so they can grab a copy if their disk image if requested)

Johnmcl7

Pretty much any multi-bay NAS device should allow you to run a RAID 1 setup where the data is automatically mirrored across the two drives so if one drive fails, you don't lose the data on it. Given it doesn't sound like you're going to be working with large amounts of data you're unlikely to see the benefit from a more expensive high performance NAS box.

Just a word of warning though, don't confuse disk mirroring and back ups - it's quite common for people to think RAID 1 protects them and they don't need separate back ups which isn't true. The problem with a RAID 1 setup is that what affects one drive can affect the other so if the box gets stolen or there's a power surge you'll lose all the data on the array and more simply if you accidentally delete data or it gets corrupted you'll lose the data because the damage will be done across both drives. Ideally a RAID 1 setup with an external drive which is plugged in once a week or similar then put somewhere separately is ideal as that way you get the automatic convenience of the data being copied to the two drives on the RAID 1 array and if anything happens to the array you can restore back from the external drive.

John

Doshwaster

I have a 2-bay Synology NAS with 2 x 2TB drives and I can't praise it enough. It does everything I want plus there are a heap of other features that I haven't even tried. I have the older 212j model but the current equivalent is the 213j. Maybe not the cheapest solution for just doing backups, but it also acts as a media server, web host and VPN server.