I've been reading as much as I can. (but not much today! - I hauled, unloaded, and stacked 150 bales of hay and I'll do it again in a couple of days, seems like this was easier back when I was 70 )
How about a "Hot spare" drive? Synology says if the storage pool degrades a hot spare can automatically repair the failing drive. (Under Storage/Storage Pool) Is this useful? I was planning to buy a couple of spare 12tb drives anyway.
Fortunately, I am not using this for data backup. I back up separately to a pool of removable drives using Macrium Reflect. All drives are backed up on three or four independent drives on manual rotation multiple times per week. I've been using multiple independent backup drives since when I was working for a living and never lost data in decades of work.
I wanted to set up a NAS as an experiment, for a learning experience and to see how useful it would be to give me access to selected files on any of the computers on my private home network (when those computers were offline) and to occasionally transfer video and photo files from friend or family. No business use, all hobby. I rely on no cloud service.
So far I haven't been disappointed.
BTW, I've configured the Macrium software to make a full backup of specified drives on a fixed schedule, then between those full backups make differential and incremental backups, sounds somewhat like the snapshot mode you mentioned. My son uses it in his video and photography business computers and said it has worked well when he needed to recover files that were corrupted or accidentally overwritten. Physical external backup drives on the shelf also seem like good insurance against ransomware. It will easily restore the entire operating system on a computer if needed. I used it to clone the Win system drive when upgrading one computer from spinning to SSD. (BTW, Macrium is good but not free.)
Good advice on the basic security. Already done at startup. I've read a lot of stuff on the security and I'll read the blog article you mentioned, thanks. I have my own system for passwords - I'm still not sure I trust password managers.
Thanks for all the help and advice.
JKJ
respect the level of knowledge many you computer wizards have.
DS File is fine for that kind of thing, assuming you have QuickConnect set up.
(I just use Picasa as a browser/viewer, not to edit anything...it's configured to bring up PS for editing. If it ever becomes unusable on Windows, I'll probably try Bridge again, but I wasn't impressed with it the first time.)
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
I do not use a hot spare -- with a 4 drive unit, I have 4 identical 4T (yeah, I know, they were "big" when I bought 'em) drives in a RAID configuration. Redundancy is scattered throughout the drives, so if one goes down, I don't lose anything while I get and install a replacement. This yields about 11 T of useable storage.
As I understand it, a "hot spare" does not participate in the RAID, but just sits waiting to be mounted. With my set up, this would only allow me 3 drives in the RAID, which would decrease my available storage area below what I need.
I consider the likelyhood of a second drive failing before Amazon could deliver me another one to be a vanishingly small risk -- still a possibility, but one I am willing to take given the fact that I do have the Glacier off-site backup available.
Your needs may differ, but with today's NAS rated drives, the mean time between failure is measured in years.
JW