suggestion for running out of hard drive space and no backups?

[Jeff B.]

Hi all,

Could someone suggest a solution for running out of hard drive space?

We have a couple of macbooks, a windows laptop and an old buiseness laptop with ubuntu on it.  Ubuntu maybe easy, but I have only a hello world understanding of it.

Problem,

We're running out of storage space on the macs and the windows laptop is used for gaming while traveling and sometimes at home. 

In my head I'm imagining a home server with raided backup, but not in my head are skills and understanding of how to set that up. 

Does anyone have a suggestion for backing up info at home and also still having that info available for access, and can be set up by a novice user?

Thanks,

Jeff

[Dan Collins]

A NAS (network attached storage) device would probably work for you, taking care of the admin and build work.

There are a lot of options for devices out there with different sizes and features like backups for your laptops and remote access. Some come with disks pre-installed and some you buy your own disks.

PC Mag has some reviews that might help you narrow the choices down.

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401086,00.asp

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[Kevin Fusselman]

Speaking of NASs, I'm a particular fan of the Synology DiskStations... I have an older single-disk model and then do offsite backups to Backblaze for redundancy.

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[Marc M]

I second the Synology Diskstations. I have been running a DS213 which is a dual drive setup

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 7:44 PM, Kevin Fusselman <ke...@fusselman.org> wrote:

Speaking of NASs, I'm a particular fan of the Synology DiskStations... I have an older single-disk model and then do offsite backups to Backblaze for redundancy.

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 7:13 PM Dan Collins <decol...@gmail.com> wrote:

A NAS (network attached storage) device would probably work for you, taking care of the admin and build work.

There are a lot of options for devices out there with different sizes and features like backups for your laptops and remote access. Some come with disks pre-installed and some you buy your own disks.

PC Mag has some reviews that might help you narrow the choices down.

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401086,00.asp

On Jan 4, 2018 4:30 PM, "Jeff B." <jbut...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Could someone suggest a solution for running out of hard drive space?

We have a couple of macbooks, a windows laptop and an old buiseness laptop with ubuntu on it.  Ubuntu maybe easy, but I have only a hello world understanding of it.

Problem,

We're running out of storage space on the macs and the windows laptop is used for gaming while traveling and sometimes at home. 

In my head I'm imagining a home server with raided backup, but not in my head are skills and understanding of how to set that up. 

Does anyone have a suggestion for backing up info at home and also still having that info available for access, and can be set up by a novice user?

Thanks,

Jeff

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[Stephen Beck]

I third the synology NAS. I use a 4 disk rack mount at home and two 12 disk units at work.

I'm buying a 4 disk unit for my dad for his birthday so we can have back ups of each other's stuff at two physical locations.

Steve

[Dan Linder]

Just to jump on the Synology fanboi train, add myself and my dad as satisfied users.  I've got my families computing devices (Windows, Linux, Android) all using "Cloud Station Backup" to copy up to the NAS.  The network view of the NAS data is read-only, and I've got my home NAS setup to do daily snapshots, so a Cryptolocker type infection can't take out the NAS too, and even if encrypted files get backed up I can fall back to an earlier snapshot.

I haven't used it as a NAS share for interactive (e.g. "drive letter") usage, but my 416 has two gigabit ports so bonding on a supported switch should give you 2Gb potential throughput.  (I haven't done that - just using a single 1Gb NIC into my office switch.)

About three years ago I tried to get a FreeNAS setup to do all this.  The FreeNAS system was cheaper by a small margin ($350 for MB, lots of RAM, 3x1TB HDDs, decent i5 CPU), but the learning curve for FreeNAS finally overwhelmed me.   A year later, for $500 (416, three 1TB HDDs) and I had it up and running in about 20 minutes with minimal ongoing maintenance (automatic updates setup for 2AM).

Just my $0.02 worth...

Dan

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[Ben Hutcheson]

I’ve been shopping for something like this as well, and am pretty much settled on a Synology, although I haven’t decided how many bays I need yet. There’s tons of help online and their user interface is great; you can play with a demo of it here.

 

One thing to be mindful of, since you briefly mentioned it in your question – while a backup can use drives in RAID, RAID itself is not a backup. RAID is primarily so you can continue delivering files to your paying customers even if a hard drive fails. It isn’t totally useless at home, but whether or not you install drives in a RAID, important data needs to be kept in multiple places, both physically and digitally separate. Otherwise there’s no protection against a power surge, data getting corrupted, or a virus getting in. Plus RAID itself isn’t 100% reliable, although that’s a whole other discussion.

 

I strongly recommend automatic encrypted offsite backups because I’m lazy; the service I currently use is shutting down and I’ll soon be switching to Backblaze like Kevin. Their normal service is $50/year for literally unlimited storage, but that can only run on a PC and can’t back up network shares. Their B2 service runs directly on most brands of NAS, including Synology, and instead of unlimited storage you pay by the amount of data stored, half a cent per GB per month (so cheaper than the main service if you’re storing less than 833 GB). However, you have to pay to download your data again if you ever need to restore.

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[Dave Thacker]

Yet another vote for Synology.  

Dave

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Dave Thacker

[Jeff Jensen]

I've been using Asusstor for my NAS at home and have one installed at a client.  There are various configurations for multiple drives, USB ports and ethernet.  I have used it primarily as a Windows file server for low use files and backups, and a Plex server.  I expect both products (Synology and Asustor) support add on apps for VPN, media server, Bittorrent, backups, etc.

So far it has worked for both locations without a problem.  Upgrades for the OS and apps are available online and managed through the web admin interface.  

I also tried FreeNAS and some of the other software appliance tools and found them to be complex, brittle and fiddly.

Jeff

[Kevin Fusselman]

Seconded, regarding FreeNAS... I ran it for several years before switching to synology and only had to mess with it about once a month...

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Dave Thacker

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[Tyler Rosonke]

If you are looking for a more cloud based solutions, duplicati is great and supports various cloud providers. it encrypts client side and just stores encrypted blobs on the cloud.

[Rob Townley]

FreeNAS was difficult for me until i realized the FreeNAS command line was not meant to be used.  Goto the webpage first and watch some videos.  FreeNAS has built-in software RAID.

$66.00 buys you a 12 empty bay StorageServer PC such as this HS-1235E IBM XIV XYRATEX HS-1235E STORAGE SYS #IBM http://www.ebay.com/itm/-/192267434747?roken=cUgayN&soutkn=yjPoNt  

It is 2u, dual power supplies, older and slower, but that might not matter so much depending on number of drives and RAM that you add.  RAM is not mentioned and you want at least 24GB or more.  

Drives are expensive.  You want Enterprise drives for a NAS which are even more expensive.  

Often times, the NAS drives are rated for an enclosure vibration of just 4, 8, 16 drives, but enterprise drives handle all of that.  

FreeNAS has so many plugable applications from NextCloud, Plex, ....

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[Kevin Fusselman]

I think you've made the case for the Synology perfectly:

* Used enterprise-grade hardware (that has relatively costly spare parts, like power supplies and memory... I might have had a bad experience with this a while back)

* Use the same drives, so no cost benefit either way there, except you need to find/buy caddies for used hardware, maybe.

* Enterprise-grade noise levels - Not great for tucking under a desk

* FreeNAS Configuration Step 1 - "Go watch some videos"

The bottom line: I have no doubt that FreeNAS on enterprise hardware is more powerful and more flexible. For someone who "wants it to work" without much thought, it's probably not the right solution.  As with many things, it's a matter of the objective.  If the objective is to build a boat, build a boat. If the objective is to go boating, perhaps there's a better way.

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