Properly setting up my NAS

[Donut417]

I have a QNAP TS-451. Im looking to set it up properly with some form of redudency. Currently I have a 10 TB hard disk that I have a little data on but mostly use for Plex. What I was looking at doing is buying 4 of these drives: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/6MX2FT/seagate-ironwolf-4tb-35-5900rpm-internal-hard-drive-st4000vn008 and setting up the NAS so it has redudency to make sure the data is a bit safer. For the record I do use a few diffrent cloud storage services for more critical data/ off site storage. I intend to move the 10 TB HDD to my Plex server directly, at the time when I bought this NAS I was using an old Laptop for my Plex server, but that Laptop died and my old gaming rig became the server and its a full ATX system so plenty of room. The thing is the NAS states stuff about RAID and about Storage pools. Im not an expert when it comes to this stuff, so maybe someone can enliten me. 

 

Also I have a series of questions: 

 

1) I have a very mixed environment in my home. Windows, Mac and Linux. I need to be able to set up auto back up on these machines. Whats the best way? My plan would be to have software monitor select folders and push the data to the NAS. 

 

2) With 4x 4TB hard disks what kind of space am I looking at? To be honest Ill probably be fine with Less, but the 4TB drives I seen were only just over $100 each, not really a bad price. 

 

3) Im planing to back up pictures, documents, and my Steam Library, any thing I should be thinking about or worried about? 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

27 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

1) I have a very mixed environment in my home. Windows, Mac and Linux. I need to be able to set up auto back up on these machines. Whats the best way? My plan would be to have software monitor select folders and push the data to the NAS. 

 

Basically all of these systems can use samba sharaes, so thatsa what id use.

 

28 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

2) With 4x 4TB hard disks what kind of space am I looking at? To be honest Ill probably be fine with Less, but the 4TB drives I seen were only just over $100 each, not really a bad price. 

Id still get the 8tb externals, there cheaper $ per tb. You cana get them for about 150

 

But with 4tb of drives, depends on redundancy goals, the 3 main options are raid 0, with 16tb(id wouldn't suggest), raid 5 with 12tb(pretty good option), raid 10 with 8tb(more speed + quicker rebuilds+ more redundcny

 

).

[Donut417]

29 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Basically all of these systems can use samba sharaes, so thatsa what id use.

But how would I automatically set the machines to back up the data? I rather not have to do it manually as I dont exactly use my moms computer. I rather it just to an auto matic thing. At least on her computer. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

But how would I automatically set the machines to back up the data? I rather not have to do it manually as I dont exactly use my moms computer. I rather it just to an auto matic thing. At least on her computer. 

lots of programs can do this. veeam has a good free windows backup progra.