Is a NAS my solution?

[JohnAJohnson]

I've read as much as I could here, and think I may know what I need, but I'd very much appreciate opinions - I don't know what I don't know.

I'm currently running two 2TB USB drives off my router and they function as data and backup storage for my home. A windows computer comes alive at 0200 every night and runs SyncBack, mirroring the data drive to the backup drive.

I want to get away from the Router/USB drives and move to a NAS. I'm considering a QNAP TS-251 with two 2TB drives, or the WD My Cloud EX2 4 TB and I think I can write to one drive and back it up nightly to the other with a Cron Job running rsync. I don't want to use the windows computer to perform the back up - I'd rather it run on something that is available 100% of the time. I have an available DD-WRT router I could probably run the Cron Job on but as I understand Rsync, it needs to reside on one of the drives. Ideally, I'd like to continue to use the two USB drives, plugged into the NAS box. The ideal setup would be to have one, fast NAS for my day to day data storage, and the other NAS drive and the two USB drives for incremental backups (backups for yesterday, the day before, and the day before that). But I'd settle for the one nightly backup to the extra NAS drive.

I also need the capability to limit access to these drives. They will be visible to anyone on the network (there is no guest network) and I'd want to permanently authorize access to some clients either by login, MAC, or by whatever it takes, and block everyone else.

Again, thoughts and recommendations are most appreciated!

 

[stevech]

I think a 2 bay NAS makes good sense.

I'd definitely avoid the WD NAS.

Choose between QNAP and Synology. I chose the latter some years back. They are quite similar. Try their on-line demos on their web sites.

USB drives can be connected to the NAS and used as you wish. I use one USB3 (USB2 is painfully slow) drive for auto-backups of selected folders. That USB3 drive is a 2.5inch USB powered Seagate $90 drive. I used to use a 3.5" USB3 but this 2.5" is easy to remove. The backups are faster if you format the external drive as extfs (native) rather than FAT or NTFS. I used to use extfs and read it on windows when needed using a freeware utility. Now I went back to NTFS format - much slower but backups take 20 minutes once a day and run late at night. The NAS is programmed to power off from 1AM to 7AM.

The Synology "Time Backup" utility is great- it makes version copies of selected directories - kind of like a time machine. Mine is set to go back several months. I suppose QNAP has the same.