Just quoting so you'll get notification
Here's my response:
I'd recommend the DS413. It's pretty close to my DS411+II, which for some reason was only made for a short time. You'll enjoy a very good speed boost on it compared to the DS413j due to the 413 having a dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM vs 512MB.
Awesome I myself was leaning towards the DS413 for spec alone
As far as Time Machine. I used it for awhile on the NAS then switched to Carbon Copy Cloner. The reasons answer your next question. I was finding that I wasn't storing any actual "stuff" on my system, but rather just the operating system and virtual machines. In other words, I didn't need to keep the history that Time Machine did. CCC backs up to an image on the NAS. So if my system ever dies, I just replace it or the failed drive and boot from the network recovery that Apple provides. Then Disk Utility can connect to the NAS and restore the latest saved image from there.
Cool I will have to look into CCC, I like time machine as its a backup but I rarely use it for its versioning so this may work out well for me. Currently I store everything on my mac ( no NAS yet ) and just use a single USB drive for backups.
As far as setting up multiple shares. If you want to treat their backups or permissions differently from one another, do it. Otherwise there isn't really a point unless you are using the NAS built-in apps that create the folders for you. I just have one main share called Storage with a few subfolders in it of my categories of stuff.
This would be fine, 1 main folder with other folders under it. I didn't want separate confusing shares sorry if I mislead ya.. Im thinking the same as you
1 share with folders in the share such as music / pics / etc. This is just for my personal mac & personal laptop.
Programs directories on the NAS. This can get tricky just because of the nature of a networked beast. iTunes Match (and this still isn't fixed by Apple) is extremely slow when it is processing a library update from an iTunes folder that is stored on a network drive. As in my 10k songs cause the program to freeze mid-update for several minutes at a time. I understand the update taking longer when on a NAS, but for now the program doesn't compensate for it and the entire thing will freeze up.
Aperture on the NAS. Apple doesn't directly recommend it. It's related to the different permissions that Aperture uses in its library structure that cannot be easily translated over a NAS protocol. Will it work? Yes. Will you occasionally get a Repairing Library message? Yes. Will it be slow? Yes, if you are doing any sort of adding, exporting functions. The speed is fine when you are editing a single photo. But when you start doing actions with multiple items, it slows down quite a bit.
There is a way around the Aperture problem. Use Disk Utility to create a SparseBundle disk image on the NAS. Make it a stupid-huge size. (It will only take what it actually needs). Then stick the Aperture library file/folder in there. This will take care of the permissions issues since it's a normal HFS+ volume as far as OSX is concerned. Plus it will take care of 80% of the speed problems because it's not doing directory traversals using NAS protocol requests.
Note that with either method, both Aperture and iTunes libraries are designed to be used by only one computer at the same time. The libraries lock themselves to prevent concurrency violations by multiple systems. You can share them between computers, but only if you close the program on the other system first.
It sounds like I would be better off leaving my iTunes library and Aperture DB on my iMac where I do 95% of my work and then just back it up to the NAS I rarely need network access to the data. The only reason I got the idea is since it was a "Network Shared" device, Its not a must to be on nas.
So from what im thinking after reading your above info, Use something like CCC ( looking into it ) Use an image based back from mac w/ccc to the NAS device now I have a backup of my machine / itunes / aperature / pretty much everything on my mac in my NAS backed up.
As far as backup. This is a mixed animal. Personally, I wouldn't bother doing a 2-drive redundant backup RAID on the NAS iteself. 1 is enough considering you're planning to do USB and sometimes-Cloud backups too. If more than 1 drive goes at the same time, it's most likely a sign that the NAS itself is dying so the extra drive redundancy probably wouldn't do much good.
Maybe I confused you it was hard to describe & easily could be confusing and I apologize.
I was just thinking if I start the NAS with 2-3 drives it would be redundant by the Hybrid Raid synology talks about. And the USB or Cloud would just be for my most critical stuff ie pictures / documents since raid is not backup.
OS / Software etc is not that important as I can rebuild easily.
So I wouldn't be backing up my time machine backups ( backup of a backup ) but just the data thats not included in the time machine backup.
Since now it seems ill be keeping my music / pics etc on the computer and not the NAS I wont have to go down that path since it will be covered in the backup already which is stored on the NAS by CCC or TM.
I think that's all that I came up with while reading your post. Let me know if you have any other questions!