Home NAS and Backup scheme

Half-Saint

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AmiBayer
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Today I was cursed with Spore ransomware and I still haven't decided what to do. There seems to be no way of decoding encoded files right now.

I'm therefore thinking about setting up a good backup system/plan and would appreciate some input from people with first hand experience.

One idea was simply to get a Synology ds115j NAS paired up with a WD Red hard drive. The other is a custom mini-ITX box with Atom 330 and 2GB of RAM which I can get much cheaper plus FreeNAS or similar.

I'm looking for permament storage of my photos, documents and other important and less important stuff that I want to have archived.

I'd like to setup a system that will let me backup daily or at least on a weekly basis. It has to be simple and fast. I'll also be getting a gigabit switch.

I'm also thinking about keeping the most important company documents on-line i.e. Google Drive, Dropbox or similar.

Ideas?
 
HP Micro servers are cheap and 4 drive bays and if you get an older gen7 or below you get a 5-1/4 cdrom drive bay.

I have one for sale but an unexpanded version is cheaper on eBay or even NEW can be cheaper than the Nas you have mentioned.

as the microservers are x86 you can install freenas , windows 2012 server or even windows 10.

they come with gigabit, if you need it ilo connection , simple VGA output, I use the low profile PCI-E slot for an ati 6450 for media playback.

they are a wonderful very reliable (mines on 24/7) , small and quiet.
 
I picked up a cheap(ish) Netgear ReadyNAS 2100 on eBay a few years back for £200 - populated it with 2TB disks and I've got 6TB of redundant storage. Not the most secure, but I can cope with a single disk failing without losing data.

Desktop versions sometimes pop up cheaper
 
I make backups of my NAS on my desktop PC. I have a script that I start manually a couple of times per week or if something major was changed that I want backed up. Remember that if the backup is performed after the data is corrupted, you may override your backup with bad data, so either have several levels of backup or only launch the backup if you are sure the data is good.

My NAS is also an HP MicroServer running FreeNAS. The file system is ZFS and one of the perks about this is that it can make snapshots so you can go back to older versions of files simply by entering special folders in the file system. Depending on your free space and how many changes have been made, you may have snapshots for every single day more than a month back, so you can get to the old files without using your backup. It is not a replacement for backups, but is a very useful extra feature. Basically, no files are ever deleted or over-written until you run out of space and then it only overwrites the oldest data with the new data. Of course this doesn't work well if you fill up the file system to >95% as there will be no space left for the old data. :)
 
demolition makes some great points. A NAS is great and I love mine but to really protect yourself, especially from ransomware, you have to have a multi-level backup solution so you can recover at least one level of older files that you do not have direct access to. The thing that scares me about ransomware is that it will search out and encrypt pretty much anything to which you have access, even on your NAS.

There are a ton of great NAS boxes so it's best to look at what has good reviews and features and go from there. The HP Micro Servers look great but they seem to be more expensive here in the USA.

Heather
 
The HP Micro Servers look great but they seem to be more expensive here in the USA.

Heather
.
just had a quick look, oh my,,,, why so expensive in USA 3 times the price of a europe one !!!!!!!!
 
I like freefilesync being honest, you can set scheduled tasks and keep a certain number of revisions when files are changed.
I have my main files on an old server, the administrator account of which has access to a mapped drive on my nas and is backed up each night. I don't use that account for anything else, only a non administrative account. The nas is in a cupboard in a different part of the house.
I so have a second older nas which is not mapped or left on, and I manually run a file sync batch job every month or so to back up the really important stuff, and is back in my home office.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
 
HP Micro servers are cheap and 4 drive bays and if you get an older gen7 or below you get a 5-1/4 cdrom drive bay.

I have one for sale but an unexpanded version is cheaper on eBay or even NEW can be cheaper than the Nas you have mentioned.

Well I can get that synology nas for roughly 71€ + shipping from amazon.de. a friend of mine has hp micro server and likes it a lot but the last time I looled they cost 150€ or more...

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It'll depend on what you call cheap - I started off buying small bits and pieces, and ended up building a miniature version of my network at work :)

IMG_8172.jpg
 
Hehe, that looks cool :)

Well the question is, what do I gain by getting a HP Micro Server opposed to a shoebox mini-ITX PC? I'm not going to use more than 1 or 2 hard drives. If you can install custom OS on both, what's the advantage of HP?
 
A PC is a PC - differences will be power consumption and reliability in terms of MTBF generally (Mean Time Between Failures) - my little server that's got the 4 Ethernet cables coming out together was quite expensive, but only consumes 30w flat out.

If it does what you want, then that's what you need :)
 
Hehe, that looks cool :)

Well the question is, what do I gain by getting a HP Micro Server opposed to a shoebox mini-ITX PC? I'm not going to use more than 1 or 2 hard drives. If you can install custom OS on both, what's the advantage of HP?

The HP is server-hardware so it supports e.g. ECC memory. If you want to run FreeNAS and ZFS file system, it is pretty much mandatory that you use ECC memory. You could of course do the same in a mini-ITX PC, but most boards that people use for this are using standard consumer CPUs not supporting ECC memory. I like the form factor of the HP with its 4 drive bays, and I could definitely not build a similarly specced PC for the same price.

The HP also has some administration features like iLO which can be useful if it sits in a place without any connected monitor. Don't think you can find anything like this on a standard PC.
 
What about cloud service for your important stuff, and local backup for what you can live without in case of fire or theft?
 
What about cloud service for your important stuff, and local backup for what you can live without in case of fire or theft?

I would not trust my important stuff to any free/cheap cloud service which I guess you are thinking about, like Dropbox, OneDrive, RushFiles and the like? Also, I would not want any company to cash in on using my data for who knows what, so either encrypt all your data prior to uploading it, or make a backup solution yourself. Remember that for these kinds of companies that provides free or close to free services, you are not the customer but rather the product.
Those cloud vendors also do not guarantee against data loss (you need to pay for a service to get that). They can be fine for keeping a secondary backup of your non-personal stuff though.

The better choice in my opinion is to setup a NAS at another location to where you can sync your important files.
 
+1 to that
I would not trust my important stuff to any free/cheap cloud service which I guess you are thinking about, like Dropbox, OneDrive, RushFiles and the like? Also, I would not want any company to cash in on using my data for who knows what, so either encrypt all your data prior to uploading it, or make a backup solution yourself. Remember that for these kinds of companies that provides free or close to free services, you are not the customer but rather the product.
Those cloud vendors also do not guarantee against data loss (you need to pay for a service to get that). They can be fine for keeping a secondary backup of your non-personal stuff though.

The better choice in my opinion is to setup a NAS at another location to where you can sync your important files.
 
I'm mostly looking to backup photos, company invoices as well as my old source code and early pixel art. There's less than 1TB of data but it's hard to get drives smaller than 2TB nowadays.
 
I have an HTPC which I backup to, plus a small drive on the router, using Acronis True Image.

Backup scheme is doing a full backup of all system drives (main PC, laptop, HTPC itself) after OS install, updates, and essential utility/application install, plus the data drive on my main PC, where I have all projects, old and new, and pictures, etc.
Then I do incremental backups of OS and data every month, and have a rolling backup of 3 months.

So:
PC1: System, Data: Original install once, then Every month -> HTPC/NAS
System, Data: Last month -> drive on router
PC2: System: Original install once, Every month -> HTPC/NAS
PC3: System: Original install once, Every month -> HTPC/NAS

Additionally I have a 4TB External drive that is used to back up the whole HTPC/NAS which houses not only backups but also movies, mp3s and whatever else I am really not that fussed if I lose, but that only gets copied every 6 months.

This has covered me for the last 4-5 years easy, and saved me from one virus infection (due to clumsiness/stupid descision), and one drive failure.

It all depends on the amount of data you need to store, how fast it grows, and how many copies, but full plus incremental for pure data volumes should allow you to backup all your stuff if 1TB to a 2TB volume with several months of differential or incremental backups.

There are pros and cons to using proprietary backup formats vs. stuff like rsync that copies files, one is probably a bit harder to get infected, the other, cheaper. :)

My 2c.
 
I just got a hold of a cheap N36L with 8GB of ECC RAM.

Can anyone recommend WD Red drives? I don't have much data so I'm considering a 2x 2TB setup with RAID mirroring. I've been told that WD Red are basically WD Green with some firmware changes.
 
Sounds like you should stay away from the dark web on your main PC :ninja:
For that purpose I have a HP Mini (from ~2010) that originally used a 1.8" HDD. I removed that and fitted a tiny 64GB USB drive in there that can be removed from the outside. The HP Mini has a USB slot inside that can be accessed from the outside with a long thin metal-cased USB drive (with a couple of small modifications).
I have multiple USB drives running both Linux and Win7 and they are all identical cloned from the master (when offline) to some spare identical USB drives.
When I want to 'test' something I insert whatever clone drive I need, do my stuff then power it off and pull out the USB drive and re-clone it from the master back to original.
If you stay away from the dark web you won't get into trouble on your main PC and for the other stuff, use something that is expendable and easily backed up running off a purpose-built USB drive.
If you want to access a NAS for media etc, use another PC just for that purpose and segregate it from the internet with a firewall. Or use a WD Media box like the WD TV. Also never have the NAS accessible from your main PC since any bad software will find it. Always do your backing up across the local network using PCs that are not online. PC's are cheap as chips now. I have about 30 PCs here and most of them I got for free off the side of the road or given to me from friends who thought they were obsolete. Those old PCs are good for running Linux and exploring the dark web (I love to click on bad things and see it fail miserably and do nothing because it's running Linux heheh!) or used specifically for tasks like backing up the local network drives.
 
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