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What NAS would fit this bill?

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ingeborgdot

Regular Contributor
I am looking for a NAS that has good security. I mean, the least likely to lose info if a failure happens. I don't know how else to explain it. Also, I want one that is easy for someone to access when not at home. For instance, I have some things I want to download to the NAS when I am on vacation or away from home. I don't need much more space than 8TB but if I'm not mistaken I should have at least 4 hard drives to be able to get the least chance of failure, if that makes sense.
Sorry, if this sounds crazy but I hope it makes sense. Thanks.
 
More drives=greater chance of failure. So go with a two-bay NAS and back it up to an external drive or other NAS. Never trust that data on a single device is safe.

NETGEAR ReadyNASes are one of the options that would fit your needs.
 
I am looking for a NAS that has good security. I mean, the least likely to lose info if a failure happens. I don't know how else to explain it. Also, I want one that is easy for someone to access when not at home. For instance, I have some things I want to download to the NAS when I am on vacation or away from home. I don't need much more space than 8TB but if I'm not mistaken I should have at least 4 hard drives to be able to get the least chance of failure, if that makes sense.
Sorry, if this sounds crazy but I hope it makes sense. Thanks.

What you're asking for is a device with a high degree of availability. If you also want it dependable, you should be looking for a NAS with at least 4 drive bays (not recommended for your needs) and preferably 8 drive bays or higher (depending on your budget).

The first two drive bays will be the NAS' os and configured in RAID1. This will allow a hdd to fail and you will still have access to the data and the NAS. The rest of the drive bays should be setup in an RAID5/6/10 array or similar. This will protect the data from hardware failures. For all of these drives, I would suggest the same type and size hdd (WD RED 3TB). With at least a few kept as spares (with a 6 hdd NAS, I recommend at least 3 hdd' bought as 'extras').

The ability to access the NAS over the internet would be best accomplished by an VPN. While many products have the ability to be configured so that they are directly reachable over the internet, I would never expose a NAS to the world like that (be prepared to get hacked sooner, rather than later).

If you really want this setup to be as dependable as possible, you need to duplicate it with an identical NAS which you can then use to make backups of the main NAS to. And, when/if the need arises, you can swap the backup NAS for the main NAS and continue to access your data without much delay.

All the network equipment should ideally also be on UPS' too, of course. And an additional backup taken on a timely schedule that ideally should be kept off site when it is not being used to do a backup to.

The above is a quick overview of what you should be considering depending on how important access to the data is to you.

You can scale it up or scale it down.

And the statement by Tim that more drives equal more failures is usually only true of RAID0 arrays. Almost any other RAID array that offers redundancy will give you a more robust storage option.

I would recommend QNAP (or Synology) myself. Any other NAS product is woefully below those two if you want the highest security, performance and reliability possible.
 
I will again weigh in as anti-RAID for SOHO users. It gives a false sense of security, whereas drive failure (the sole protection offered by RAID), is low on my list of risks. Higher are
  • Human error (oops, I misconfigured; I deleted; oops, I hosed up that document and have no other copy)...
  • File system corruption due to power issues, malware, ...
  • Theft of NAS
  • Lack of adequate and frequent backups
  • NAS RAID rebuild doesn't succeed (all too commonly heard)
So a two volume NAS is prudent, even on a 2 bay.

Just my perspective.
 
I am looking for a NAS that has good security. I mean, the least likely to lose info if a failure happens. I don't know how else to explain it. Also, I want one that is easy for someone to access when not at home. For instance, I have some things I want to download to the NAS when I am on vacation or away from home. I don't need much more space than 8TB but if I'm not mistaken I should have at least 4 hard drives to be able to get the least chance of failure, if that makes sense.
Sorry, if this sounds crazy but I hope it makes sense. Thanks.

They're all fairly robust - the top tier NAS vendors totally get this - but even then, one needs to back up the data, as things do happen - the risks there are well beyond just drives failing - think fire/flood/theft and the random lightning strike, along with things people do - very important to back NAS boxes up because of the data concentration that many people do, as NAS's are a big box of stuff at the end of the day...

With remote access - Again, QNAP, Synology, Asustor, and Netgear's ReadyNAS all offer different degrees of remote access...
 
Recently, we were at a nice dinner out with 3 other couples. One asked me about Carbonite backup. I understated my non-recommendation of that, vs. first having your own external drive backup.

Then it came up that one couple had lost most of all family photos from digital cameras. Then the other 2 couples said so had they, and it was so very sad. In hindsight, they said they were so naive - like thinking that putting all photos on an external USB hard drive was a backup. (It was the sole copy, and it had a crashed heads event).
 

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