NAS Setup

[Narked Diver]

Hi,

My iTunes library is currently stored on an external 2Tb drive and I use CCC to back it up to a second 2Tb drive

The drive is slowly filling up so I'm thinking of moving to a NAS (mainly so I can hide it away somewhere )

I'll probably go with a two bay QNAPS or Synology with 3Tb drives

I know I can use raid with these drives to keep them in sync but would it be better / easier to set them up as two separate disks and continue to use CCC to do the backups?

 

[Gav2k]

If your going to use a NAS dump ccc and let the NAS do the work for you. I would recommend the qnap (x53 series) either run the iTunes server feature or continue with your current setup. But you can set the qnap to auto sync to save you manually dragging files round.

 

[AFEPPL]

I'd recommend the Synology range and if you can, look towards 4 bays and 4TB Red drives.
3TB is only 50% more than you have now, i.e. 1TB more once you go RAID 1. With a 4 bay unit you could look to use RAID 5 for better capacity utilisation.

You could could also use the existing 2TB drives in the 4 bay unit once you've moved over the data and have 2 4TBs and 2 2TBs in 2x RAID 1 sets giving you 6TBs of storage. Don't forget you still need to backup a NAS device...! Replication or backup can be scheduled directly from the NAS device so you don't need CCC at all.

 

[phrehdd]

If you are talking about two bay NAS you can set it to RAID 1 and pick which ever way you want to do backups - initiated by a NAS script or app or by the computer itself with apps like CCC. As there is only a slight difference in price from 3tb to 4tb, you might consider 4tb drives.

If you go with 4 bay drive NAS, there are other options available as well.

 

[Narked Diver]

Assuming I go down the 2 bay, raid 1 route would I be able to hot swap the mirrored disk once a week as a backup strategy?

 

[phrehdd]

Assuming I go down the 2 bay, raid 1 route would I be able to hot swap the mirrored disk once a week as a backup strategy?

I'll try to be brief but if not ...

Technically you could but you wont want to do this because:

1) Most 2 bay NAS require trays for drives meaning you need extra trays or unscrew the drive from on of the trays etc.
2) You would have to each time reconstitute a mirror (takes time depending on amount of data and drive)
3) Most of the two bay NAS units are not intended for "rotation" though they can technically do it)
4) While some might say different, greatest potential for errors is in (re-)constituting a drive as is physical drive issues.

If you continue the NAS route, consider an external drive (not unlike what you are doing now) and back up the NAS to that drive that will be used for off-site rotation. While I use/have NAS storage, for off site, I would never consider removing a drive from a NAS but as stated, back up the NAS. I consider the NAS both storage and local backup of computers only. If my computer drive fails, I use the NAS to reconstitute the data after the computer drive is fixed/replaced.

Last - years ago, I worked for a company that had tape rotation. They put the tape drive in the server dedicated to storage server. When anything went wrong with the tape or tape device, they had to shut down the storage server (take it off line) and then get the tape backup unit working. I opted to take the tape device out of the storage server as a stand alone device that was connected to the storage server. This allowed the storage to continually back up the multiple desktops without issue and kept all "shares" active. When the tape drive failed, I could disconnect it and fix it and bring it back up on line without any issues. Ultimately, every company branch did the same thing by extricating the tape drive (used for off site storage) from the storage server. Hopefully, the analogy is clear here.

 

[Narked Diver]

Thanks for the explanation - this is starting to get expensive now

Wish you could get higher capacity 2.5 inch HDDs - would be easier then to just swap my out current set-up for larger disks

Maybe I ought to consider a 2 bay DAS as an interim solution

 

[phrehdd]

There are small portable drives out there by Western Digital and Seagate and others.

Here is a quick example (it also lists others by link within)

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_4tb_backup_plus_portable_drive_review

 

[AFEPPL]

You can get a 2 bay NAS DS215 for £130 on Amazon, and start with a single drive either 3TB or 4TB (£80/130) then add the second drive as you get more money.

Don't bother with DAS.

 

[Dubadai]

I have a DS415+ with 6TB drives. Since the NAS itself isn't a "backup", but more fore mechanical failure redundancy, i have set up CCC to backup FROM the NAS to a pair of external disks whenever i plug them into the computer. Other than that I run everything from the NAS. All movies, music, etc.

I even have all of my 1.5TB of RAW photos store on there. I have the Lightroom catalog (stored on the iMac since you can't have catalogs on the NAS) just point to the folders with the RAW files. Since the NAS is fast enough I can edit "right of" the NAS.

PM me if you have any NAS questions.