"NAS" Advice

Hello, I am currently researching how to move my storage over to some sort of NAS device, but I have hit kind of a brick wall.

I have some files for myself, the Mrs and son will soon have his own school work. I also have videos of kids growing up, pictures etc, stuff that I cannot replace. Currently my backup plan is a "more or less" backup of stuff in England (parents live in England, I live in Sweden) and then a further backup of that using Windows 7 backup to a 1.5TB drive in a caddy.

That bit is working okay IMO.

The "problem" comes in because we also have a music library, mixed mp3 and flac, mostly ripped from CD, some of it downloaded (legally of course), and of course a movie, documentary, tv series library too.

I see that most of you end up using ZFS as a giant pool, and slap everything onto that.

I was wondering how much of a "bad" or impractial solution it would be to have a small NAS box, maybe a Node 304 for example, and I manage where all the media files etc are on what disks. I don't require drive pooling at the moment, I am sure we can cover one type of media on less than 3TB of space, making pooling redundant.

Then have for example, Windows 8 Pro (already got a spare copy here from my old XP licence upgrade) as an OS and some sort of Rsync backup method. Of course the OS would be on some small SSD and then all the other drives would be run with data on them.

Are they are massive drawbacks to this? Could it literally be so simple (for example) 3x 3TB Drives in the NAS, and 3x 3TB drives in caddies, and just plug them in 1 at time, they do their Rsync thing and hey presto put them in the safe again. Would Rsync also be able to backup remotely (to parents)?

Sorry for the nooby questions, and the long post, I realise there is probably an answer to everything I have asked, but so many people have so many different opinions, and of course everything is possible, just seems a matter of finding the right software or hardware for the job. I have also considered say a Qnap 6 bay NAS, but they seem to run around 2x the cost of a MITX system, but without anything added over what I would get running a Win 8 machine.

Any 'legacy' solution will mean you have no protection against bad sectors. That is a major problem IMO. So either you need proper backups of everything, or you should be willing to endure dataloss when bad sectors occur. Even worse, if they occur in metadata, a large portion of your filesystem can die with it. The alternatives ReFS and Btrfs are not mature enough to consider in its place.

I would either focus on a legacy solution involving good quality backups like two NAS boxes where one is basically a copy of the other. The alternative and best solution, of course, is ZFS. The only mature solution which provides real protection to your data in this era of storage technology.

Where would you class a Win 8 Pro with FlexRAID on top as a solution?

Say have 1 drive with Win 8 only, another drive for "irreplaceable stuff", with a "snapshot", or "realtime" drive with a futher external backup. (or 2 if you include offsite at parents)

And then say a pair, maybe expanding to 3 storage drives (music, films etc), with a single snapshot drive for those. Re ripping stuff would be annoying, but I am a little scared of buying everything from the same batch because of multiple concurrent failures so may well expand and swap drives around and have 1 snapshot per drive.

Does that sound like an acceptable solution?

I am not against ZFS, I would just like to explore some other avenues as well! The idea of having all the data on the drives already and "merging" them into a FlexRAID is very appealing

Many thanks!

P.S. I realise that stuff like a high quality UPS and surge protection, and a good quality PSU are also part of the proper NAS setup, I haven't neglected these from my thoughts either, just ironing out the largest "problem" first, which direction to go

sub.mesa said:

Any 'legacy' solution will mean you have no protection against bad sectors. That is a major problem IMO. So either you need proper backups of everything, or you should be willing to endure dataloss when bad sectors occur. Even worse, if they occur in metadata, a large portion of your filesystem can die with it. The alternatives ReFS and Btrfs are not mature enough to consider in its place.

I would either focus on a legacy solution involving good quality backups like two NAS boxes where one is basically a copy of the other. The alternative and best solution, of course, is ZFS. The only mature solution which provides real protection to your data in this era of storage technology.

Click to expand...

Sorry to piggy back, but is ZFS the only file system that can properly handle today's storage to mitigate data loss? My personal research on hard drives has me scared that any drive I buy nowadays will die on a whim.

ZFS will not protect you from device failure any more than other solutions (raid 5/6/1/10). What it will do is help protect against silent data corruption that may otherwise go unnoticed.

I personally liked the simplicity of a NAS and then I manage my data from my main PC. I don't like the idea of having a full blown OS running my NAS as that just allows for many more avenues to introduce problems.

Anymore input on this?

Say if I got a Synology DS412+, and had 2x3TB drives for data, and a redundant 3TB drive using their Hybrid RAID thing. I would have the option to expand to another data disk at a later date.

Or is a 3+1 probably with 2TB or 3TB Reds using Z1 really a better solution? Any point having a mirror of one of those drives to a 5th drive using some chipset RAID solution?

Thing is only a small proportion of my data (around 600GB and growing fairly slowly) is stuff that I cannot do without. The other data can be re ripped from DVD's and CD's but would be time consuming. Same if I noticed one of the movies was playing badly because of a hard drive defect. Would having that NAS solution, plus a backup that I ran when I made changes to those files (finished archiving more photos or video basically) be enough?

Does the NAS peform any sort of MD5 checking to see that the new files it is writing that are already on the disk have the same MD5 as the files on the backup volume? Or does their hybrid raid do any sort of error correction, checking etc?

Would it be more prudent to say have 2 backups on site, 1 offsite? Reason I ask this, it seems that even if you have 30 backup copies, if you are backing up from bad sectors, the backup will be worthless, and it seems that there is no way to know about bad sectors without using ZFS?

Liggywuh said:

Would having that NAS solution, plus a backup that I ran when I made changes to those files (finished archiving more photos or video basically) be enough?
....
Would it be more prudent to say have 2 backups on site, 1 offsite??

Click to expand...

Personally, I like the "legacy" solution as sub.mesa described it over ZFS: two NAS boxs that are copies of one another over ZFS since I'm not a big fan of the ZFS's method of drive expansion. Nothing bad about it per se but just not my cup of tea. So IMO, two backups and that should be enough.

Liggywuh said:

Does the NAS peform any sort of MD5 checking to see that the new files it is writing that are already on the disk have the same MD5 as the files on the backup volume? Or does their hybrid raid do any sort of error correction, checking etc??

Click to expand...

AFAIK, Synology NAS don't do any sort of error checking or hashing automatically. Though there might be a way to do so manually:
http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?lang=us&q_id=555

Liggywuh said:

Reason I ask this, it seems that even if you have 30 backup copies, if you are backing up from bad sectors, the backup will be worthless, and it seems that there is no way to know about bad sectors without using ZFS?

Click to expand...

Do note that ZFS is not the end-all be-all solution to drive storage. Apparently SnapRAID does do MD5 hashing to make sure your data is more or less in one piece.

Danny Bui said:

Personally, I like the "legacy" solution as sub.mesa described it over ZFS: two NAS boxs that are copies of one another over ZFS since I'm not a big fan of the ZFS's method of drive expansion. Nothing bad about it per se but just not my cup of tea. So IMO, two backups and that should be enough.

Click to expand...

If I were to have say a 412+ or a 1812+ at home here, and then say a smaller 2 bay NAS at my parents house in England (I live in Sweden), and then have a physical spinner that sits in a caddy as a 3rd backup, as long as both NAS have UPS that should be a fairly good backup and disaster "proof" system right? As I said, the media files I can re rip, videos can be re rendered, etc, but the core files, pictures etc, can't be, so it is only a small amount of data that needs this super protection.

Danny Bui said:

AFAIK, Synology NAS don't do any sort of error checking or hashing automatically. Though there might be a way to do so manually:
http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?lang=us&q_id=555

Click to expand...

Okay thanks. I will do a little digging

Danny Bui said:

Do note that ZFS is not the end-all be-all solution to drive storage. Apparently SnapRAID does do MD5 hashing to make sure your data is more or less in one piece.

Click to expand...

¨

This sounds promising, although I was kinda hoping that I could get the compact size of a Synology for example, with the proetction of ZFS, but I guess I could build a small box, say a Core 1000 case, for example.

Many thanks for your time and input, I will go and research some more

Liggywuh said:

If I were to have say a 412+ or a 1812+ at home here, and then say a smaller 2 bay NAS at my parents house in England (I live in Sweden), and then have a physical spinner that sits in a caddy as a 3rd backup, as long as both NAS have UPS that should be a fairly good backup and disaster "proof" system right? As I said, the media files I can re rip, videos can be re rendered, etc, but the core files, pictures etc, can't be, so it is only a small amount of data that needs this super protection.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't say disaster proof but you would have a pretty high chance of data safety with that method.

Danny Bui said:

I wouldn't say disaster proof but you would have a pretty high chance of data safety with that method.

Click to expand...

But as it goes, there isn't so much else I could do "inexpensivly" or easily? I guess I could run it inside one of those 30 min fireproof safes

For a smaller box you if you want to do a custom DIY build you should check out the HP Microservers. When on sale they can be quite cheap and even when not on sale are usually cheaper than the Pre-built NAS solutions.

I personally have my NAS as my "operational" copy of the data and then my main PC acts as a second copy of all that data. Now if you have a vast amount of data that isn't very feasible, but I don't use my main PC like I used to so I just rip my media to it and then copy to the NAS and stream from there. I also only have about 1.5TB of data right now and have two 2Tb drives in my main PC for the second copy of the data.