Building a NAS

[NitromanseR]

Hello everyone,

I would like your help in my "building a NAS" project. In fact, I will use a NAS-ready solution but I have a few questions on how to set things up.

First of all let me explain what I want to do. I live in New Jersey but I grew up in Europe. Currently, I have 3 external hard drives in my hometown in Europe with the same exact backup. Whenever I visit my hometown every few months I update my 3 backup drives. Until then I backup everything on Google Drive/Dropbox. Since I might be moving a lot due to work, for me it is a better solution for my backups to be in my hometown in Europe. However, because this is really inconvenient I though of getting a NAS which will be in my hometown, store all my data there and be able to make changes whenever I want to or retrieve data from anywhere in the world. I know that NAS/RAID is not considered a true backup but I have made my decision and I will go with that.

In order to be safer I would like to ask you the following questions for the NAS I have chosen (QNAP TS-451 with 4x WD Red 4TB drives):

1) Will I be able to set my NAS for a RAID 1 configuration (and not RAID 10). In that way, I will only have 4TB available for use but I will also have three disks "backing up" for more safety (4TB are more than enough for me and I am not considering RAID 10).

2) Will it work to setup the 4 drives in the NAS separately and not in any RAID mode? I will have to backup the same things 4 times but on the other side, if I delete something accidentally from 1 drive, then I still have 3 more copies.

3) Is it worth it to get an additional (smaller) NAS, for example WD My Cloud 4TB, and have my QNAP NAS backing up itself to My Cloud? I will have the My Cloud in New Jersey and the process will go through the internet. That is why it might be really slow and not worth it.

4) If something goes wrong with the QNAP unit and I it breaks down along with up to 3 drives. How can I retrieve the data from the 4th (still working fine) drive? Do I have to buy a QNAP unit again and rebuild?

Thank you very much for your time!

 

[simas]

I have both built my home server (Windows Home Server originally and Windows Server 2012 essentials later) as well as used commercial NAS from Synology.
Few thoughts
1) have backups and multiple copies of data, and have that over RAID. Have at least 3 copies of data which would cover you for vast majority of scenarios. RAID is useless if the motherboard on your NAS is having problems. RAID also could mess with data vs stand alone drive which you can stick into most linux installs (i.e. Ubuntu) and read your data off that way.
2) understand what scenarios you are protecting against , weight their probability and then create response. is it main computer failover? NAS failure itself? share corruption (another con against creating massive volumes over RAID)? house burning down?
3) rate your data in priority, not all of it is the same importance and as such not everything needs to be backed up over internet to a cloud provider.
4) check out http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/ and http://www.snbforums.com/ if you have not done so already. healthy community focusing on NAS among others.



If interested, here is how stuff in my family works

Server (2012 Essentials) - backups up my Windows computers (as they are in the domain) and contains their file history.
Server has 3 'drives' - OS drive, Server data drive (file history and image backups), User data drive (actual pictures, videos, documents). Server data + user data are both implemented over mirrored physical disks, OS drive is single SSD . Servers backs itself up to separate hard drive , user data is 'mirrored' to Synology 115J

if windows workstation/laptop fails - it is restored from image on the server.
if specific file is needed- it is restored from file history
if server data fails, it is restored from server backups
if user data fails - it is restored from server backup or copied back from NAS
if server wipes out completely - brought back by server backup
if NAS fails- user data is copied over again from the server or from its own backup external HDD
key folders are also copied to crashplan

this way key things exist in 3+ copies (workstation, server, NAS, cloud). user files in 3 copies (data at rest on workstation, server, NAS), and both server and NAS have their own backups and copy each other for folders they are responsible for . There have to be different separate isolated failures to be impacted.