First NAS. 1bay or 2bay

[Davidcur]

Hello everyone
I am looking to buy my first nas.It is for an all Mac home. I am looking for the usual things-- centralized storage of music,videos movies, etc. I am leaning towards the synology units. The area I need help with is backup. I have been reading that RAID is not backup.In a two disc unit that is mirroring drives can I take 1 drive out and store offsite and install a new drive and let the unit rebuild. Kind of like a 3 disc rotation. The other idea I had is the 1 drive unit and a USB external for backup. The other question I have is when you take a drive out of a 2bay synology can the data on that drive be read by a computer or would you have to buy another nas to read the data if the original nas was broken or stolen. I am learning a lot and would like any suggestions.

Thank You
Dave

 

[teknojnky]

while it sounds good in theory, it is generally not a good idea

http://www.readynas.com/?p=3153

 

[SoftDux-Rudi]

You're right, RAID isn't backup. A backup is only a backup if you have 2 copies of the data.

That said, what you want todo is a form of backup, as long as you rotate those drives often enough. BUT, since the RAID rebuild takes a long time (could take several hours to a day) it might be better to get 3 drives - leave 2 in the NAS and a 3rd offsite. Then when you swap-out the 3rd drive the other one can re-sync again. We do this with a few clients who can't sync their data to an online storage server.

Something else we do with a few other clients is to have their storage synced to a 2nd NAS (they own it) on our office via a wireless network. Obviously this isn't possible in all situation. One of our clients live close to his office and we could also setup a point-to-point wireless network for him todo the same thing. He has 2 NAS devices which sync each other in real-time.


I'm not sure about synolygy, but most NAS devices use a linux OS so you could just mount it on a Linux PC, or just use a Linux Live CD if you need to



A word of advice though, buy the biggest NAS you can afford today, i.e. look a 4 or 6 bay if you can. You'll outgrow the storage on your current NAS much quicker than you think.