Help! Qnap NAS hacked and files locked

What does RAID actually give you?

It gives you high availability, if a drive dies you can still carry on working until you replace it. Obviously you are at a higher risk of data loss until the drive is replaced and the array is rebuilt, this risk is covered by your backup though. It can also give you faster read speeds if your data is stripped across several disks. But apart from that what did the romans ever do for us :-)

I have a mix of RAID5 and mirrored arrays in my home office and I backup offsite using Crashplan Pro. I have a disk down in one of the RAID5 arrays at the moment (it is backed up too) and I can just keep using it without having to worry about restoring it etc from crashplan over the internet.

So for some people RAID is very useful.

For the hard of thinking ( me!) can someone explain in words of one syllable the best / easiest way to hold backups for free?  I have just put all my photos on an SD card – is that good enough?  I also have an old tower desktop – is having them on that and on a sd card as well as on the desktop I use enough?  best way to use the old tower as a backup?

Ta

I would hate to lose all my photos

Depends how many photos but I’d be adding off site via onedrive/google drive/dropbox as well, never forget to factor the total loss of your house as well.

Ta. One drive was very easy to set up and all my files are now heading to it.  ta muchly. I thought it would be difficult!  sometimes its hard being a luddite!

Thanks for all the comments and advice.

@highpeakrider

I also pay under £9 a year for automatic offsite backups to synology plus external usb.

Where do I find this?

Onedrive gets cheap as part of an M365 / Office subscription if having use of MS Office office is also useful to you. Keep your eye out for M365 deals on hotukdeals, £40-50 quid per year (6 x 1TB storage) comes up regularly at Argos and you can ‘stack’ subscriptions.

I pay around £70 a year for the Syntology C2 service (released with DSM 7.0). We don’t back up individual machines, but we do (either automatically or manually) copy everything we really care about (including our limited company stuff) onto our basic 2 bay (mirrored) NAS.

It’s only 1TB, but that’s enough for the data we really care about and includes the time machine backups from my Mac. So in terms of the standard 1-2-3 backup, we’ve gone for.

1- all our most important / not backed up elsewhere data on the local NAS

2- NAS backed up to Syntology C2

3- iCloud enabled for all my work/personal data

4- OneDrive used randomly by other family members

We run two factor everywhere for the NAS/backup and I don’t let the Syntology client work through the firewall. If I need data desperately I just get someone to email it to me (I think I can get it off the C2 server as well)

I’m probably as worried about ransomware as I am about disk failure. For £70 a year, it’s piece of mind.

Oh I also back up GoPro not GoPro cloud and a local removable 5TB drive. Which also has a copy of our company accounts / invoices / etc as a third backup.

On the Syntology v QNAP thing, our little 2 bay has been brilliant for three years. Not the fastest, but the software has really come on. It was quite confusing to set up at first (and we use hardly any of the features other than file store, one shared folder for sync). But now with all the security scanning and actually pretty decent reporting, it definitely makes me feel I’m on top of managing the data.

Not used QNAP so no experience.

https://c2.synology.com/en-us/pricing/storage

@villina83 I use the 100GB plan at €9.99 a year

Thanks all

I’ve now got a Synology NAS and have recovered all my data (I paid the ransom)

I’ve got about 2TB of photos so the C2 option is looking best at the moment

vanilla83
Free Member
Thanks all

I’ve now got a Synology NAS and have recovered all my data

Did you have port forwarding set-up on your router?
I’ve got a QNAP NAS & followed the advice to disable port forwarding on the router. When I looked at the port forwarding settings on the router, there was nothing in there so I assume that is something that I had to have done at some point, rather than something that would automatically set-up?
I guess that’s why loads of the stuff I have tried to do like sharing photo folders with family has never worked….

EDIT – I hope the ransom wasn’t too costly!

Yes I did – to use their remote connection thing which is where the attack came from. Other people have said that they hadn’t but still got attacked.

So far (touches wood) I’m using my own settings on the home router without the QNAP convenient cloud remote login option. This may be a problem with the QNAP cloud settings and not the box. I’m also using 2FA which is a pain but after the OP’s experience may well be worth its weight in gold bitcoin.

On the synology don’t forget to implement the 2 factor authentication for log in and disable the default admin account.

https://kb.synology.com/en-ph/DSM/help/DSM/MainMenu/account?version=6