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illusiumd

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 12, 2013
34
3
I've been driving myself crazy with this transition from my dying Hackintosh (with 5 HDDs) to my Studio. I have about 3TB and growing of the most important photos, movies, docs etc that I need to backup. It feels like none of the external USB hard drive options I've found are as dependable as my internal old HDDs - WD Blue and Blacks.

Even tho it's overkill, I'm willing to invest time and money setting up a Synology DS224+ and just get everything on one 8/10TB HDD in some kind of RAID formation. And then somehow back that up to BackBlaze or Crashplan.

How hard is it set something like this up? Any other options I should consider? Damn I wish I could open it up and some drives in there. I know PC is an option but I'm fully invested in the Apple ecosystem.
 
I use Iron Wolf drives in my Synology NAS'. It comes in many different sizes to fit your need and budget.


It isn't hard to set up a Synology NAS, in my opinion. Make sure you get good drives and use the appropriate RAID, along with a backup plan, and you should be fine.
 
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FWIW… using Time Machine to back up to a synology drive is a bit of a pita.. not because of the SMB, it’s because Time Machine is not a conventional backup. Having upgrading 2 machines in the past couple of months, you run out of space fast. I had to lose my old backups or replace 2 perfectly good drives (I have a ds220j). Typical Apple… it’s not a conventional backup.
 
You can no longer back up a NAS to Backblaze or crashplan without paying per gigabyte charges. They need to be locally connected disks.
For backing up to Synology, I gave up on Time Machine and just use Chronosync.
 
You can no longer back up a NAS to Backblaze or crashplan without paying per gigabyte charges. They need to be locally connected disks.
For backing up to Synology, I gave up on Time Machine and just use Chronosync.
I did manage to fiddle it for a while by using Automounter to mount my Synology but with my slow upload, it wasn't a viable proposition.
Chronosync looks interesting, I do Time Machine to my DS1019+ but may consider that.
 
I did manage to fiddle it for a while by using Automounter to mount my Synology but with my slow upload, it wasn't a viable proposition.
Chronosync looks interesting, I do Time Machine to my DS1019+ but may consider that.
Time Machine has its issues. Here’s my overriding concern: I have adult children that should be backing up their computers but don’t. Time Machine to a Synology drive gets rid of that problem since I have to fix all computer problems in the house.
 
I use a Synology NAS for Time Machine backups for all of my Macs. I do data recovery for a living and highly recommend WD Gold HDs. I think that the 10TB ones are the best price per TB right now.

I do a local ChronoSync backup as well to an external HD and it's a great piece of software.
 
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You’ve had good luck with Golds? I’ve been using Reds because they're NAS recommended. Ironwolves are expensive. I was thinking of going down to cheaper disks because not a lot of non-linear disk movement
 
You’ve had good luck with Golds? I’ve been using Reds because they're NAS recommended. Ironwolves are expensive. I was thinking of going down to cheaper disks because not a lot of non-linear disk movement
Golds are very much like the Red Pros, but with enterprise support. They are basically the Hitachi Ultrastar line after WD bought Hitachi. Same factory from what I've been told.
 
How hard is it set something like this up?
It’s actually incredibly easy despite the comments here. When you make a file share there’s an option to advertise it as a TM mount. Shows up automatically etc.

TM just makes an encrypted APFS sparse file on the NAS. You can have multiple machines backed up to the same share with no issue.

I do the same thing. But I run backblaze locally.

 
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