Hey everyone,

My parents have a bunch of data just sitting on external drives, and that data is not copied anywhere. They have lost family photos to a failing drive before, and I want to prevent something like that from happening again.

In this vein, I want to get them a complete NAS solution for a Christmas present. I work in technology, although not in IT, so I am competent at understanding things of this nature but do not have the knowledge myself currently.

Ideally, this is my target system:

  • an easy-to-use NAS that they will find intuitive (and cannot easily break)
  • a automated backup solution (ideally one on-site and one in the cloud, I use Backblaze B2 personally)
  • perhaps a UPS to really mitigate the possibility of error (do you all think this is necessary?)

I will provide

  • a budget to get this done (I am comfortable spending between 1-2k USD)
  • the initial setup for them
  • support in the future should something go wrong

Any advice is greatly appreciated! I’m not currently aware of how much storage will actually be required, but I think 5 or so TB to start would be sufficient.

I’ve been looking at synology NAS options and am really just looking for advice on whether I’ve made some sort of mistake in reasoning, companies/products to avoid (or use), and any other advice you all would think is valuable :) Thanks again!

  • that_one_wierd_guy@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’d look for something you can administer remotely, that way when something goes wrong(trust me something will) it won’t have to wait till you can go over there, to get it fixed. also while your at it, something that can double as a media center might be nice

    • FiziksMayMays@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Thanks for your comment!

      I’d look for something you can administer remotely,

      Totally agree! I’m not far now but who knows in the future :)

      something that can double as a media center might be nice

      That’s a great idea, especially because they have a collection of DVDs I could rip and put on there. Any particular considerations that matter when adding the ability to be a media center (besides maybe transcoding)?

      Thanks again!

  • Houderebaese@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Id get a synology with two bays and then use shr1. I think that the „synology drive“ app might work well for them. It will sync each users data to the /home folder the syno NAS.

    Then you make sure to get btrfs compatibility so that you can use snapshots, get snapshots for at least a year or more if we’re talking about small files.

    Then use hyperbackup on the NAS to automatically backup whatever is important to the cloud (i like hetzner storage boxes but synology c2 works as well) AND to the external disk they are using right now.

    Snapshots will protect from accidental deletion and malware encryption. Same for the external disk mostly. The cloud backup will protect from all that + fire, theft etc.

    While synology drive sync works wonders, the local devices won’t keep a full copy, so keep that in mind when using it since that won’t count as a backup. And your folks have to be instructed to put stuff only into that synced folder or it won’t backup at all.

    That way they never have to worry about manually backing up or even using the NAS at all. However, the Nas has to run for this to work properly.

  • snatch1e@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Just get a synology NAS, it looks like the most decent option which is pretty intuitive and also easily to setup.