NAS Questions

[Xatris]

Hellow people of the internet, 
I love to make videos, and as everyone knows, it takes up a lot of storage.  Unfurchanatly, I don't have enough money to buy a laptop with more storge, so I have come to the brilliant decision of looking into NAS. Of course, I am a total noob in storge, so I have a few questions.

My first one is if I can connect to it from anywhere.  My parents are divorced, so I split my time between there two houses, so I need to make sure I can access the NAS at either location, including school.  

My second question is if I do choose to buy a NAS then should I get rid of iCloud drive.  Right now I have a two terabyte plan, and I am almost out of storge.  The problem is, they don't have any higher storge plans, and even if they did, there is no way I would ever be able to pay for it.  

My third question is, what is a reasonable price for one of these units and do you guys have any suggestions.  Also, how many bays should I get?  

I appreciate any help I can get, thanks.

 

 

 

 

 

[Atra1n2]

If you set up port forwarding you can get access to your NAS from anywhere with a password, however your speeds will be limited to the slowest internet connection between your house and wherever you are.

[Anghammarad]

A reasonable good 2 bay NAS with for example 2 x 4 TB HDD will cost around 400-600 bucks ($ or €) depending on the offer. 

 

Most of those NAS are offering the free Owncloud server solution. But with that, you have to make firewall rules in the internet router, where the device is located, so you can connect from the internet. 

 

There the usability depends on the internet connection speed, where the NAS is located.

[Windows7ge]

I don't have much experience with consumer NAS options but if you can find it in your budget to build your own I know you can set it up to access it anywhere with as much storage as you desire, redundancy, security like public-private key authentication. It would have an initial investment though.

[Beskamir]

I don't suggest using portforwarding. The best option is to use a VPN which can be done by hosting a vpn on your router and then conneting to it.

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

have a look at nextcloud. I have not used it yet but it seems popular for "personal cloud" storage.

The number of bays etc; I believe that 4TB drives still give the best size/price economics; only you can work out how much you need.

If I were to connect my storage up to the internet I would build a computer and use ubuntu server as it will give you better software security updates than a consumer NAS.

You said you currently use 1TB of storage, this is about what I have in home videos. I have my files duplicated on several disks and I just use a USB dock. I don't run a NAS for non-commercial use when my files can fit on one drive, and I am the only person who should be accessing them.

[seagate_surfer]

As has already been mentioned, a consumer NAS unit will allow you, if the port forwarding settings are configured, to access the NAS anywhere remotely. Two popular brands, just speaking generally from what we have observed in the time we spend looking through forums, are QNAP and Synology. As far as pricing guesstimates goes, you'd probably just have to decide which models may be a fit for your exact needs and then look around on pricing and try to figure out where the right match for you is.

Just remember 2 things please if you do decide to go this route: 

1. Check the compatibility tools on the NAS vendor you choose's website first to make sure the hard drives you choose are both compatible and NAS-rated. If you don't know why this is important, here is a video on choosing the right drive for the right application.

2. Please do yourself a favor and always keep in mind that NAS is NOT a backup. You're still going to want to have a separate backup strategy for any data you deem important. The sage wisdom on the subject is the 3-2-1 strategy: Always have 3 copies of your data, 2 of them on different mediums, and one of them stored somewhere off-site in case of natural disaster/fire/flood, etc.

Edited July 21, 2017 by seagate_surfer
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