Apologies if this is an overly common thread, i can't find one which is exactly the same as my situation so im hoping someone can advise...
We have a small design studio with 4 main iMacs (2017 5k retina 27inch) there is a couple of other lesser used macs and 2 PCs all of which are less important in regards to this query.
We use TimeMachine to backup the macs, first we had the apple airport Time Machine attached to the router which wasn't near big enough, so we then after a bit of research invested in 2x Buffalo LS220D NAS enclosures, each had a couple of 4TB drives RAIDed so everything was duplicated automatically, we set 2 iMacs backing up to one WAs and the other 2 iMacs to the other, they were TimeMachine compatible and seemed to work ok.
recently during the upgrade to Catalina i had a major issue and my iMac after trying everything else had to be wiped and restored, which was great till i went to restore, first attempt was a full restore from recovery mode, over the wireless network it estimated 36 hours to restore, (around 750GB used storage on my iMac) so i set it going, and overnight on the second/third day it failed... i decided to connect it to the network via ethernet to try again hoping it would be faster, this time i installed the new catalina first and tried to use migration assistant, but it couldn't find the drive/backup checked the NAS drive and it was not well... one drive had completely failed, and i couldn't get it to respond at all. after a lot of panic i was advised to remove the failed drive from the enclosure and thankfully that allowed me to do a restore over that weekend.
there has been a couple of issues for example my old emails haven't restored properly, but it could be worse.
SO im kind of out of the woods for now, however i want some good advice on a safe and reliable replacement for this buffalo drive which failed, and possibly both of them, as i don't trust the other one either now.
I don't want to spend an insane amount but I'm happy to stretch past the cheapest/budget drives in favour of reliability, easy of use and peace of mind.
they have to be easily TimeMachine compatible, and something which works well over a local office network for all the iMacs, they also need to be plenty big as we work with large files/photos, and also fast so backups/restores don't take forever.
when i checked online most NAS enclosures now seem more expensive than i remember and often don't even come with drives included..?
if its compatible with PCs too thats a bonus but not essential.
Any advice would be very much appreciated
We have a small design studio with 4 main iMacs (2017 5k retina 27inch) there is a couple of other lesser used macs and 2 PCs all of which are less important in regards to this query.
We use TimeMachine to backup the macs, first we had the apple airport Time Machine attached to the router which wasn't near big enough, so we then after a bit of research invested in 2x Buffalo LS220D NAS enclosures, each had a couple of 4TB drives RAIDed so everything was duplicated automatically, we set 2 iMacs backing up to one WAs and the other 2 iMacs to the other, they were TimeMachine compatible and seemed to work ok.
recently during the upgrade to Catalina i had a major issue and my iMac after trying everything else had to be wiped and restored, which was great till i went to restore, first attempt was a full restore from recovery mode, over the wireless network it estimated 36 hours to restore, (around 750GB used storage on my iMac) so i set it going, and overnight on the second/third day it failed... i decided to connect it to the network via ethernet to try again hoping it would be faster, this time i installed the new catalina first and tried to use migration assistant, but it couldn't find the drive/backup checked the NAS drive and it was not well... one drive had completely failed, and i couldn't get it to respond at all. after a lot of panic i was advised to remove the failed drive from the enclosure and thankfully that allowed me to do a restore over that weekend.
there has been a couple of issues for example my old emails haven't restored properly, but it could be worse.
SO im kind of out of the woods for now, however i want some good advice on a safe and reliable replacement for this buffalo drive which failed, and possibly both of them, as i don't trust the other one either now.
I don't want to spend an insane amount but I'm happy to stretch past the cheapest/budget drives in favour of reliability, easy of use and peace of mind.
they have to be easily TimeMachine compatible, and something which works well over a local office network for all the iMacs, they also need to be plenty big as we work with large files/photos, and also fast so backups/restores don't take forever.
when i checked online most NAS enclosures now seem more expensive than i remember and often don't even come with drives included..?
if its compatible with PCs too thats a bonus but not essential.
Any advice would be very much appreciated