How are you using your NAS?

[sammyman]

How are you using your NAS? I used to use it to keep all of my iTunes, movies, and some pictures so all computers could share. However, my NAS recently died, and I am working on recovering the data. I know I know. I didn't have a backup of it. However, it was only 4 months old when it crashed.

So now, I am wondering if it would be better to use the NAS primarily as a backup for each computer in the house. Maybe I should move my itunes to a Mac Pro? And then stream that to a mac mini for the home theatre? Any advice on how you are using your NAS?

 

[SidBala]

My NAS provides storage to all the devices in my network. I am running WHS on an PC recycle box. I use it as a NAS, torrentbox, printserver, and as a live transcode/stream server.

I put two hard drives on my box and enabled replication for the important files like documents, pictures, music. Other stuff like movies etc are off replication.

So if a hard drive fails, then I might lose the movies but the docs, pics and music are safe.

 

[pastrychef]

sammyman, how did your NAS die? Were you running with any redundancy (i.e. RAID 5)?

I use my NAS to store all my movies and to archive all my data. Eventually, I'd like to also use it for Time Machine backups of all my computers.

 

[dimme]

How are you using your NAS? I used to use it to keep all of my iTunes, movies, and some pictures so all computers could share. However, my NAS recently died, and I am working on recovering the data. I know I know. I didn't have a backup of it. However, it was only 4 months old when it crashed.

So now, I am wondering if it would be better to use the NAS primarily as a backup for each computer in the house. Maybe I should move my itunes to a Mac Pro? And then stream that to a mac mini for the home theatre? Any advice on how you are using your NAS?

Have you thought of getting a external USB or firewire drive and running on your mini as a NAS. I have a old CD2 MacBook Pro Laptop I run 24/7 as a torrent/file server. I have a WD green drive in a usb external case with my itunes library, files and photos. It is pretty fast and very energy efficient.

 

[reebzor]

My "NAS" (which is actually a hackintosh server) is doing mostly file sharing, hosting my movies and Plex Media Server, email and web server, torrents, print server, as well as time machine.

 

[kiranmk2]

I find the best way is to use the NAS for hosting the large amount of media files I have (photos, videos, music). Then I buy a couple of USB hard drives (usually can be picked up for £100 for 2 TB at the moment). Then I use the NAS' inbuilt-automated backup to perform differential backups so I have a copy of my data on a separate hard drive. Then every month or so I swap to the other USB drive and store the first one at work to protect against theft/fire. As far as I can figure, this is the cheapest, easiest way to ensure data backups.

 

[FourCandles]

Have you thought of getting a external USB or firewire drive and running on your mini as a NAS. I have a old CD2 MacBook Pro Laptop I run 24/7 as a torrent/file server. I have a WD green drive in a usb external case with my itunes library, files and photos. It is pretty fast and very energy efficient.

I've got that type of setup. I had a QNAP NAS running Squeezebox & iTunes Servers and switched to an old Mac Mini running headless with a couple of FW drives - one for media and one as a Carbon Copy Cloner backup. Performance is hugely improved.

 

[Mike Oxard]

Mine is used to backup my aperture library referenced masters (I.e. The original photos) Once a day Chronosync automatically runs and synchronises the originals on my iMac with the nas drive in the cupboard.

 

[sammyman]

sammyman, how did your NAS die? Were you running with any redundancy (i.e. RAID 5)?

I use my NAS to store all my movies and to archive all my data. Eventually, I'd like to also use it for Time Machine backups of all my computers.

I think the unit went bad. I am not sure how. I was running RAID 5, so hopefully it will be back up and running when the new Synology arrives. It is possible there was some data destroyed when the NAS failed.

Have you thought of getting a external USB or firewire drive and running on your mini as a NAS. I have a old CD2 MacBook Pro Laptop I run 24/7 as a torrent/file server. I have a WD green drive in a usb external case with my itunes library, files and photos. It is pretty fast and very energy efficient.

I have heard of others doing this. I will have to look into it a little more so I understand how to set this up. Maybe I could do this, and have the Mini as a NAS, and then use the other NAS as a backup only???

 

[sammyman]

I've got that type of setup. I had a QNAP NAS running Squeezebox & iTunes Servers and switched to an old Mac Mini running headless with a couple of FW drives - one for media and one as a Carbon Copy Cloner backup. Performance is hugely improved.

That is cool to know that the performance is improved... What are you doing with the QNAP now?

 

[zhenya]

For a long time I used my NAS (junk parts, Ubuntu Server, RAID 5) as the centralized source for my media library - primarily my iTunes music and video. I've recently moved all of the music to the drive on the iMac that runs iTunes, and now primarily use the NAS to backup that iMac and the several other computers in the house. It's just much, much easier to keep a backup that way, as opposed to having either a second server of the same size for backups, or having to manually back up the NAS to several drives. I don't back up the movies, as I don't consider them all that critical (well, ok, some of them occasionally get backed up when I happen to have a large external drive attached and think of it, but rarely.) This way all important data is backed up every day, automatically. That important data is further backed up to the cloud, currently using Crash Plan.

This is the primary issue I see with people moving towards centralized storage - you end up with a large amount of data in one place that is difficult/expensive to back up in any automated fashion, and you have a single failure point for most of your data.

 

[Cliff3]

How are you using your NAS?

Mine has two roles: it is a backup target for Time Machine, targeted OS X folder-level backups via 3rd party software, and backups of Windows clients, and it hosts an iTunes client and library to stream video and music to two Apple TVs. It is an HP EX490 with 7TB of internal HDD, and an upgraded CPU (Intel E6300 - 2.8GHz Pentium Dual Core).

It hosts 2.4TB of data which is duplicated for redundancy via WHS' folder duplication feature. I use robocopy and cmd scripts to back it up at the share level to bare external drives via an eSATA drive dock. The server backups are plain old NTFS format partitions so they are easily read by other devices. Full backups are enormously time-consuming, but incremental backups only take a few minutes.

I separately maintain bootable clones on external drives for each of my two Macs. They're simpler to boot from than the WHS TM backup, and the WHS TM backup is always there to recover from once the Mac is up and running again.