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Yodalogger

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 18, 2005
41
7
St. Louis MO
I am looking into acquiring a NAS unit to accomplish a couple of items. First I would like to use the storage as a time machine backup for the 3 macs in the house. Second, I would like to use it as a centralized iTunes depot that I can access with my laptops both on my LAN and when I'm outside the house. Third, I would like to be able to back up the NAS to an external hard drive so I can take the backup drive out of the house.

I had heard that one issue with a NAS and time machine with multiple computers is that a computer with a larger amount of changes could delete some backups for a computer with lesser amounts of changes.

Anyway, does anyone have any experience or pointers in setting something like this up. Thanks
 

blevins321

macrumors 68030
Dec 24, 2010
2,768
96
Detroit, MI
I wrote a review about the Synology DS411j a couple of months ago. HERE is the link. Before I sold my MBP, I had my iMac and MBP both using Time Machine on it. I never had an issue with deletion of files. I had it set to a high quota though, but it never crossed 600GB on the NAS total.

Synology makes smaller NAS units that have the same software as the one I reviewed. They have both a 2-bay and a single bay. Benefit to an extra bay with another drive is that you have redundancy in case one of the drives fails. I also have a USB hard drive attached and it backs up the entire NAS twice a week.
 

amarcus

macrumors 6502
Feb 26, 2008
357
102
London, UK
Depends on your budget but I'd definitely look into a Drobo FS. It fully supports time machine backups, although it's performance isn't exactly spectacular (I guess if your using it just for backups and some basic streaming then this shouldn't be much of an issue...).
 

Yodalogger

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 18, 2005
41
7
St. Louis MO
thanks for the info... is the external hard drive backup something that you can set within the NAS interface or do you need to use something like carbon copy cloner?
 
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