4 Independent Hard Drives in 1 Enclosure?

[OuterMarker]

We have 4 computers that need to be backed up (2 PCs and 2 Macs). Ideally, I want each computer to have its own dedicated hard drive. The PCs will use Windows File History and the Macs will use Apple's Time Machine. The cleanest solution would be one 4 bay NAS attached to our network switch, but I have never built a NAS with independent drives?

 

Is it possible to get something like a WD My Cloud PR4100 4-Bay NAS and have 2 hard drives operating as a time machine back up and the other 2 as a file history backup?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Have you though of using a network backup tool like urbackup or barcula? they normally are easily to manage, let you restore images easier and work better for multiple systems.

 

Normally you put all the drives in one pool, then make shares. The goal with a nas isn't to make one share with each drive. Then you c an setup quotas if you want to limit the max size used by each gpu.

[porina]

If you just want something to hold 4 HDs, look at HPE Microservers. The lower spec ones are very affordable, and you can install whatever OS on it you like to manage the backups. From there you can run either NAS like software e.g. FreeNAS, unraid, or run a normal OS with its sharing capability.

[Radium_Angel]

Don't futz with building your own NAS.

Buy a pre-made one, set it up for RAID (the reason you'd use a NAS to begin with) and set up folder shares with permissions for each PC.

That way they get the space the need, but the benefit of RAID.

I'm a fan of ReadyNAS by Netgear, but there are plenty of others

[Jarsky]

Basically all of the nas's do JBOD, but theres really no reason to have 4 seperate disks? You could have 3 in a RAID5, or have 1 x RAID1 or even 2 x RAID1's (1 for the PC's, 1 for the MAC's), and just have a directory for each computer. That way you have resiliency if any of the drives die...

[Pixel5]

it doesnt really make sense to do it that way, get a pre build nas with as man drives as you need space or with the kind of RAID you want to run and back them up onto this machine.

 

if you would want to back up on individual drives you could just use an external drive for each of them and be done with it but you wont gain any redundancy.

[OuterMarker]

I was able to do it. I got a QNAP 4 enclosure NAS and put 4 3TB hard drives in it. I then set up a 1 drive volume for each computer with automatic backup. I know there is no redundancy, but this is not my only backup. I have a 80TB home server in RAID6 that contains all of our media and documents. Each computer has a local copy of our documents and the media is backed up online. The point of this server was just to make an easy backup for each machine that would make restoring a failed computer easy.