Morning! Clicking LaCie drive means I need a new backup solution, and was thinking that Easter gives me time to set up a NAS. Synology DS215j with a brace of WD 3TB looks a good bet at just over £300 for our Mac-based backup & streaming requirements. Anyone with warnings/poor experiences here?

(Had thought of a Time Capsule, but they seem less reliable and more expensive.)

Thanks!

Yeah they seem good. I bought the 415 a week or so back to replace a WD my book world.

For backup purposes I’d just get an external drive, unless you’ve got a compelling reason not to. What benefit is a NAS giving you?

Also, what happens to your backups if your house burns down or you get burgled?

Personally ,and this depends on how much storage you need, I’d get a single drive NAS, such as a Synology 115. And a separate, portable hard drive, such as a WD Passport, to back up to and store away from your house.

Cheaper and offers better disaster recovery.

Synology works really well for backup and streaming in particular. I use it to host all video and audio, and it’s streamed to 3 macs, 2 TVs running plex, 3 amps using dlna clients. Works really well, and has done for 4/5 years.

You can have a time machine client on the NAS.

As said you need an offsite backup solution also if you want to keep data that’s important to you, but this is not an argument to not get the massive benefits of a NAS.

Was thinking NAS, so that it could be a Time Machine target for the MacBooks’ automated back-up, plus allow the AppleTV to use it as a streaming source. Appreciate that it’s at risk in a burglary/house fire, but I keep the photos backed up on a pocket drive every so often and leave that at work.

Edit: posted whilst mynamesnotbob was replying – thanks.

Also thinking of getting a NAS but it’s more for local sharing (and moving the kids’ ridiculous video library off my laptop HD) than backup.

I’d start with Illmatic, still his best.

For backup purposes I’d just get an external drive, unless you’ve got a compelling reason not to. What benefit is a NAS giving you?

Also, what happens to your backups if your house burns down or you get burgled?

Well, if you are doing it properly it means you have your files stored on a resilient filesystem like ZFS that protects against corruption as well as device failure. Add to that your files are now accessible to multiple devices the extra expense definitely becomes worthwhile.

If worried about data-loss from fire or theft then choose from a plethora of cloud backup services too.

Job done 😀

Our Synology Diskstation with a couple of 3TB WD drives has been operating for about a year now. Used for backing up our laptops and desktop plus music and film streaming. Highly recommended. No dramas it just works

I use a single drive nas for streaming and storing media etc then have a just cloud account for photos, home video and documents auto updated daily from laptop and 2 x phones. I can handle losing films as easily replaceable but having an off site backup for photos is peace if mind. Cost is around £30 a year.

Set up a DS215j a couple of weeks ago, no dramas although only have 1 drive at the mo. Done what mynamesnotbob said, streaming audio and movies plus personal and shared drives for the household. Works fine with Chromebook, PC, Humax, Android & Chromecast. Not tried any silly Macintosh nonsense.

I use a synology for time machine as well as media, great bit of kit and been very reliable.

For backup purposes I’d just get an external drive, unless you’ve got a compelling reason not to.

One external drive per device in the house that should be backed up ? Wouldn’t a centralised solution accessible to all devices be a better solution, not to think of serving media/making files available on the go to mobiles, etc ?

It is time to make the leap to client-server architecture.

I’ve got a QNAP TS212. It’s a few years old so there may be a newer version of it out now but I’ve had no problems with it. It’s accessed by iThings, android devices, a windows laptop, a Mac and a ‘smart’ TV and it all works pretty easily.

Who is best for cloud based file storage? I really need to sort out something for photos. Around 65gb

Google is about £1 a month for 100Gb.

I use it for backups of photos / vids other content from laptops and (try to) back up off site too.

I used to have a 2 disk mirrored 2*1TB set up. You have more than 1 disk so that when 1 disk fails you don’t lose any content and just plug in another drive.

Off site is poss but for big photo /vid files it would take ages to upload and download every time you wanted to edit them with a standard ADSL connection.