Help choosing a NAS

[Keudn]

Hey guys, I am looking to buy a NAS as an onsite backup for my drives on my PC. I am a photographer so I need a backup of my entire photography drive as well as some other folders. I feel like I am beating my head against a wall trying to find information about NASes because every review talks about crap I don't want like Plex.

 

My photography drive is 3TB, and I would also like backups of some important folders like my documents and whatnot, so I will probably need at least 4TB of NAS storage. I don't give a shit about any other features of a NAS besides it having a copy of all these files. I want to be able to set it up, have it backup files whenever there is a change or a new file added, and I never have to touch it again. It should be a box sitting by my router that silently keeps my data safe in case of my drive dying. I am trying to find reviews or instructions on how to set one up to backup files when there are newer ones, or new files created, but I can't find anything. Is this possible? I don't really want to have a scheduled backup if I can avoid it as I dump large amounts of files at a time and that leaves me open to the chance of a drive dying when I had dumped 100GB of photos on it, but not having a copy due to the scheduled backup not happening for another day. I want it to see "oh hey new files lets back those up" or "oh hey he saved a new version of this file lemme grab that real quick" silently in the background. The only extra feature I might care about is cloud backups, however I don't have 4TB of google drive storage anyway and uploading that much would take months.

 

Does anyone have a good, cheap NAS drive that does nothing else but be a fileserver I can set up to backup my files like I want? I don't want to pay for a NAS with a quad core CPU meant for media streaming when I don't care about that. Also, if anyone has some info about how I can configure a backup system like I want please share, thanks!

[BrinkGG]

2 minutes ago, Keudn said:

Hey guys, I am looking to buy a NAS as an onsite backup for my drives on my PC. I am a photographer so I need a backup of my entire photography drive as well as some other folders. I feel like I am beating my head against a wall trying to find information about NASes because every review talks about crap I don't want like Plex.

 

My photography drive is 3TB, and I would also like backups of some important folders like my documents and whatnot, so I will probably need at least 4TB of NAS storage. I don't give a shit about any other features of a NAS besides it having a copy of all these files. I want to be able to set it up, have it backup files whenever there is a change or a new file added, and I never have to touch it again. It should be a box sitting by my router that silently keeps my data safe in case of my drive dying. I am trying to find reviews or instructions on how to set one up to backup files when there are newer ones, or new files created, but I can't find anything. Is this possible? I don't really want to have a scheduled backup if I can avoid it as I dump large amounts of files at a time and that leaves me open to the chance of a drive dying when I had dumped 100GB of photos on it, but not having a copy due to the scheduled backup not happening for another day. I want it to see "oh hey new files lets back those up" or "oh hey he saved a new version of this file lemme grab that real quick" silently in the background. The only extra feature I might care about is cloud backups, however I don't have 4TB of google drive storage anyway and uploading that much would take months.

 

Does anyone have a good, cheap NAS drive that does nothing else but be a fileserver I can set up to backup my files like I want? I don't want to pay for a NAS with a quad core CPU meant for media streaming when I don't care about that. Also, if anyone has some info about how I can configure a backup system like I want please share, thanks!

Since you're only doing backups, you could consider a DAS box if you're not moving the computer alot as well.

If you want a NAS though, something cheap like the Synology ds218j or the Qnap TS-230 are both 2 disk nases that you can drop one 4TB drive in now for your current storage needs, then when you're low on space, drop another drive in next to it and you're good to go! Personally I recommend the Synology between the two as their software availability is much better, and they're also more popular, which has expanded their community support quite a lot. 

[Radium_Angel]

17 minutes ago, Keudn said:

I am a photographer

As am I.

17 minutes ago, Keudn said:

cheap NAS

Don't exist.

 

But I can tell you what I use, because my set up is exactly the same you want.

ReadyNAS NV NAS (they are older, fair warning)

and this

https://www.newegg.com/lenovo-70b89003ea/p/14P-000A-00164

 

All lovely NAS devices. Just do what they are good at, data RAID

[Radium_Angel]

23 minutes ago, Keudn said:

thanks

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Iomega-IX4-300D-Network-Attached-Storage-NAS-4-Bay-Diskless/233480086502?epid=9037845996&hash=item365c7f63e6:g:W8kAAOSwWm5dXwqI

 

[Master Disaster]

On the file syncing topic, you would want something that supports rsync for automatic syncing between folders however you can always use Cron to set up a backup job and have it automatically run once every X hours.

 

Edit - Thinking about it, you will need rsync support as using Cron would force a full backup of everything rather than just backing up any new or edited files.