First NAS

Luisa · April 20, 2021

Hello

I bought a Synology 920 and 2 pro harddrives, my goal is to have personal storage and backup.

My question is, is it possible to merge and use those 2 HDD now and add 2 later for backup? Is it even possible?
Or should use 1 for storage and 1 for backup now?

Thank you!

FloRolf · April 20, 2021

Yes I think you can do that but I like to have everything ready when you start, that way it's much easier to setup. Just get 2 more drives now and make a raid 5 and you are good to go.

But Please keep in mind, Raid is NOT a backup! You need (offsite) backups on a different drive as well to be (more) secure.

For example in a raid5 1 hard-drive can die. If a second one fails all your data is gone. That shit can happen.

Master Disaster · April 20, 2021

By default it will probably use SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) and yes, you can add drives to the pool after the fact depending on which RAID mode you go with.

Luisa · April 20, 2021

54 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

Yes I think you can do that but I like to have everything ready when you start, that way it's much easier to setup. Just get 2 more drives now and make a raid 5 and you are good to go.

But Please keep in mind, Raid is NOT a backup! You need (offsite) backups on a different drive as well to be (more) secure.

For example in a raid5 1 hard-drive can die. If a second one fails all your data is gone. That shit can happen.

Thank you for the answer!

How can I make my backups safer then?

43 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

By default it will probably use SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) and yes, you can add drives to the pool after the fact depending on which RAID mode you go with.

Thank you so much for the answer

GreatCrouton · April 21, 2021

On 4/20/2021 at 4:01 AM, Luisa said:

How can I make my backups safer then?

There's probably better ways but I have a QNap NAS and I bought another drive that equaled the size of the storage on the NAS and used it's built in backup software to backup all the data to the removeable drive. I then take that drive to my office and leave it there. Repeat that once a month or so.

I guess you could backup to another PC in your home but getting your backup out of your house is, IMO, the best/safest practice.

Other alternative is cloud backup but that may not be doable depending on the amount of data you have on your NAS and depending on your ISP speed, may take forever to complete.