Do I really need a NAS?

[Erasius]

Recently I've been looking into various back up solutions because I currently have none whatsoever.
I'm a freelancer and right now I pretty much put all of my work files on a combo of external 2TB SSD/HDDs and if one of them fails I'm toast. 
I got into looking for prebuilt NAS devices but comparing the specs of hardware and software do not really tell me what I actually need. In fact I wonder if a NAS is beneficial for me at all?

Basicly all I am looking for is this:

1.  A safe and easy way to load and store files with autobackup / redundancy at an "affordable" price for 1 user.
2. As little setup as possible. ( cloud access is a small plus but I work 100% locally anyway )

My primary device is a desktop at my home office and I have a secondary older desktop offsite in case I ever need it.
I have iCloud for my other devices and 1TB OneDrive for photos and such but I can't really backup my local work files on there due to the size and OneDrive only allows backup from their own predetermined folders.
While I could get a bigger cloud subscription on something like google drive, I much prefer avoid paying yet another subscription and having access to my own data instead.

So based on that I was wondering do I even need a NAS? Or should DAS with external backup drives ( 1 local backup and 1 offsite ) be more suitable since I'm the only one who needs access to these files?
Would something simple like a "western digital my cloud ex2 ultra or My Home cloud" be sufficient Or would a Synology be a better fit? and how does something like a DS223J / DS223 / DS224+ compare in terms of speed and accessibility? I have no idea if the difference between Intel vs Arm CPU and the amount of ram has any noticeable differences for my use case and would much rather spend the difference in price on the HDD's instead of features I might never use.

Thank you.

[LIGISTX]

11 minutes ago, Erasius said:

Recently I've been looking into various back up solutions because I currently have none whatsoever.
I'm a freelancer and right now I pretty much put all of my work files on a combo of external 2TB SSD/HDDs and if one of them fails I'm toast. 
I got into looking for prebuilt NAS devices but comparing the specs of hardware and software do not really tell me what I actually need. In fact I wonder if a NAS is beneficial for me at all?

Basicly all I am looking for is this:

1.  A safe and easy way to load and store files with autobackup / redundancy at an "affordable" price for 1 user.
2. As little setup as possible. ( cloud access is a small plus but I work 100% locally anyway )

My primary device is a desktop at my home office and I have a secondary older desktop offsite in case I ever need it.
I have iCloud for my other devices and 1TB OneDrive for photos and such but I can't really backup my local work files on there due to the size and OneDrive only allows backup from their own predetermined folders.
While I could get a bigger cloud subscription on something like google drive, I much prefer avoid paying yet another subscription and having access to my own data instead.

So based on that I was wondering do I even need a NAS? Or should DAS with external backup drives ( 1 local backup and 1 offsite ) be more suitable since I'm the only one who needs access to these files?
Would something simple like a "western digital my cloud ex2 ultra or My Home cloud" be sufficient Or would a Synology be a better fit? and how does something like a DS223J / DS223 / DS224+ compare in terms of speed and accessibility? I have no idea if the difference between Intel vs Arm CPU and the amount of ram has any noticeable differences for my use case and would much rather spend the difference in price on the HDD's instead of features I might never use.

Thank you.

I’d just get backblaze. It’s 7 bucks a month for unlimited backup….. hard to pass that up. 

[Sheperad306]

I have a NAS that I built; It has photos, video, and personal info on it for safe keeping.

In total how much storage do you have and need to back up?

How large of a budget do you have?

 

(Some thing I can say now is the more DIY you get the cheaper it usually is; however come at the cost of complexity and time.

If your looking for a easy straight forward menu and usage some premade nas's (like the synology one you mentioned are good)

[Erasius]

40 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

I’d just get backblaze. It’s 7 bucks a month for unlimited backup….. hard to pass that up. 

I'm not familiar with backblaze, sounds like a good deal but I do prefer storing / having access to my own data especially with any client work under NDA. But I'll look into it, much better deal than google drive. Thank you.
 

38 minutes ago, Sheperad306 said:

I have a NAS that I built; It has photos, video, and personal info on it for safe keeping.

In total how much storage do you have and need to back up?

How large of a budget do you have?

 

(Some thing I can say now is the more DIY you get the cheaper it usually is; however come at the cost of complexity and time.

If your looking for a easy straight forward menu and usage some premade nas's (like the synology one you mentioned are good)

I'm currently not exactly sure how much storage I need since I'm in the process of cleaning up files I do not need anymore. But my guess is that I roughly create up to 1TB+ of files a year so at least 4TB-8TB to be safe for now. For budget I was thinking between 300-500 euro's total. I also thought about DYI by turning my old desktop into a NAS but as you mentioned time + complexity and the size / power / noise output of a full desktop just for backup is a bit too much for me. Which is why I had my eye on either something by WD or Synology for ease of use.

[LIGISTX]

25 minutes ago, Erasius said:

I'm not familiar with backblaze, sounds like a good deal but I do prefer storing / having access to my own data especially with any client work under NDA.

They offer client wide encryption… so, I wouldn’t let this be a concern at all. 
 

Nothing wrong with building a NAS, but RAID is not a backup. 

[MG2R]

I’d go for the combo of a NAS and an external backup solution. Reasoning is that you need to both tackle availability and retention. 
 

* availability: assuming having access to your data is needed to perform the job you’re doing, running off of individual drives is not done. 1 drive is no drive. You need some form of redundancy in your set up so you can keep working even when a drive fails.

* retention: assuming you’re boned if you permanently lose data from one of your projects/clients, having one copy of your data is not done. 1 copy is no copy. You need some form of backup so your have a copy of your data if your working set has a disaster. 
 

Get a cloud backup service with zero-acces, client-side encryption. Backblaze was already mentioned. I personally like Borg for my backups for their deduplicated snapshotting. Gives you the ability to easily to point-in-time recovery. Not sure if Backblaze has that now. Borgbase is the biggest provider for Borg cloud space.

 

For availability, get a NAS. Synology is great and easy to use. For a one-man operation it might seem overkill compared to direct attach storage, but the flexibility it provides in moving from computer to computer and having multiple devices with access to the data is unparalleled and one of those “can’t miss it once you tried it”.

 

Something like a DS423+ should handle your current and future data needs if you chuck large enough drives in there. Synology integrates with Backblaze or other vendors as well if you want. This allows you to have automated backups and even cloud sync. 

[Erasius]

16 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

They offer client wide encryption… so, I wouldn’t let this be a concern at all. 
 

Nothing wrong with building a NAS, but RAID is not a backup. 

Yeah you are right, I think I confused redundancy with having a backup  my bad.
Had a look at backblaze and it does look like a great option for offsite backup given that they also have a EU datacentre. I'll give it a shot once I have solved my local storage.
 

9 hours ago, MG2R said:

I’d go for the combo of a NAS and an external backup solution. Reasoning is that you need to both tackle availability and retention. 
 

* availability: assuming having access to your data is needed to perform the job you’re doing, running off of individual drives is not done. 1 drive is no drive. You need some form of redundancy in your set up so you can keep working even when a drive fails.

* retention: assuming you’re boned if you permanently lose data from one of your projects/clients, having one copy of your data is not done. 1 copy is no copy. You need some form of backup so your have a copy of your data if your working set has a disaster. 
 

Get a cloud backup service with zero-acces, client-side encryption. Backblaze was already mentioned. I personally like Borg for my backups for their deduplicated snapshotting. Gives you the ability to easily to point-in-time recovery. Not sure if Backblaze has that now. Borgbase is the biggest provider for Borg cloud space.

 

For availability, get a NAS. Synology is great and easy to use. For a one-man operation it might seem overkill compared to direct attach storage, but the flexibility it provides in moving from computer to computer and having multiple devices with access to the data is unparalleled and one of those “can’t miss it once you tried it”.

 

Something like a DS423+ should handle your current and future data needs if you chuck large enough drives in there. Synology integrates with Backblaze or other vendors as well if you want. This allows you to have automated backups and even cloud sync. 

So if I understand you correctly you recommend using the NAS as my primary storage device combined with external HDD and cloud backup, instead of using the NAS as the backup itself? See I always thought about having a NAS just as a backup of my current external drives but your solution does sounds more logical considering the costs.  Does the network connection add a lot of latency to loading/saving large files or is the difference between that and a USB connected external HDD negligible? and how is the noise level of a 4bay NAS as I need to place it either in my living room or office?

[MG2R]

If you’re on a wired gigabit network, you can stream files at 100+ MB/s

 

not sure what files you’re working with or what performance you’re expecting but a typical external hard drive wouldn’t be much faster. 
 

4 hours ago, Erasius said:

you recommend using the NAS as my primary storage device combined with external HDD and cloud backup

I wouldn’t even bother with the external hard drives. It adds too much manual labour. 
 

if backups are not 100% automated, I consider them not backups at all. You don’t want to be thinking about your storage, you want to be working on your core business. Set it up properly, get some form of automated alerting in case it fails and then stop worrying. 
 

oh: *test* your failure recovery before putting mission critical data on your new hardware. Put some test data on there and yank a drive. Learn how to recover from that failure. Then set up backups and try recovering your data from one. The amount of times I’ve seen businesses in trouble because they never bothered verifying they could work with their backups is astounding.