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Thread: NAS recommendations?

  1. #31
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lee DeRaud View Post
    'Photo Station' goes away in DSM7, replaced by 'Photos'...not quite sure how different it is beyond the name change. I've never used either one though: everything I do photo-related is on PCs on the LAN, and I'll keep using Picasa as my photo browser until they pry it from my cold dead hands.
    I installed the 7.0-41890.

    I do almost all my photo work with Photoshop or PS Elements but sometimes I want to show someone a photo on my phone. I think it would be nice to connect to the NAS from anywhere and pull up the photo.

  2. #32
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    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


    Quote Originally Posted by Chris Fairbanks View Post
    John, like Roger and others I have been a synology user for well over a decade. One thing you want to be cautious of with any type of storage system is drive failure. While your Raid5 setup will protect your data in the event of a single drive failure, a rebuild of a 12tb drive is going to take 24-48 hours and that’s assuming you have a spare on hand. If during this time you have another drive start to act up all your data is going to be lost. That is why most companies run either raid 6 or raid 10 for data protection and not raid 5. I run a 5 drive synology system in raid 6 at home and my Colo server runs raid 10. If you don’t want to add another drive to convert your synology to raid 10 at least make sure you have good backups of it. I also backup everything to aws glacier and the built in synology client works great for that. It’s only 4/10th of a cent per GB per month to backup your data. Where amazon gets you is if you have to restore. They charge multiple different costs but it quickly adds up to over 10 cents per gb to restore. So just make sure you never need it ��

    The other feature you may want enable is called snapshot replication. The idea is you can setup the synology to take a snapshot of the data on the system every X amount of time. That way if you accidentally delete or overwrite a file you can quickly restore it. This is also a great level of protection from ransomware unless they actually compromise your synology and delete your snapshots. I run hourly snapshots and keep the last 12 hours, 7 days and 3 months of them. That way I can go back in time easily and fix anything I have messed up. Snapshots are done at the block level of the file system so they don’t consume that much space assuming you are not adding and deleting a bunch of files on a regular basis.

    Finally make sure to keep your synology secure. The two main things are to disable the default admin account and make sure you have auto updates enabled. Synology has a bunch of articles on this but here is one I found with a quick google search. https://blog.synology.com/10-securit...your-data-safe Good luck and feel free to ask any other questions you may have.

  3. #33
    respect the level of knowledge many you computer wizards have.

  4. #34
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    Quote Originally Posted by John K Jordan View Post
    I do almost all my photo work with Photoshop or PS Elements but sometimes I want to show someone a photo on my phone. I think it would be nice to connect to the NAS from anywhere and pull up the photo.
    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.)
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  5. #35
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    Quote Originally Posted by John K Jordan View Post

    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.

    JKJ
    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

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