[wpflum]

I'm going to have a bit of cash to spend on my home server system and want to have a dedicated NAS server with a backup. What I currently have is almost 10 terabytes of video and data across two linux samba servers and no way of backing up anything other than the 3TB on a raid 5 setup. What I was thinking of was having two NAS servers, dedicated hardware not freenas or such, where I can have 5 bays of 4TB drives in each that are not raided. I started with raid but basically a raid is for either speed or redundancy for keeping things going with no downtime whereas I need backup more than speed or downtime security. What I want to do is have the main NAS in the server rack, did I mention I'm getting a rack, that serves the system and then the other NAS will be in my bedroom so that the main NAS can back up each drive to a corresponding drive on the bedroom NAS. I figured this way I'll always have a redundant backup of the main NAS so that if a drive fails I can replace it and reload from the backup. For this I need two NAS units that don't have to be the same since only one needs to have any real smarts to do it's own backup and that don't do anything weird with the drives other than format them with a common partition and file system. I want to be able to pull the drives if the NAS fails and still be able to read them without some kind of special raid card or a duplicate NAS. I can, if need be, run a freenas or whatever if I can't find something that will handle the backup style I want but I'd prefer a plug and play if possible for both.

Any suggestions?

This might be a moot point if total cost of one gets anywhere close to the price of a new LTO-6 or LTO-7 tape drive since I'd rather do 4 or so tapes to backup 20 TB at about 30-40 bucks a piece. That way I could get a couple of batches and have some history instead of just a current backup, but that is at the higher end of what I'd like to shell out.

[movie78]

This is the one I am using, it's pain to set it up in the beginning but once set up it works really well.

[UsefulG]

+1 for the Synology it can be used for all kinds of things aside from just storage. Mine hosts a MariaDb instance to share my library across devices for example. Going forward I'm also looking into a second one to provide resilience.

[hdmkv]

Another vote for Synology... extremely reliable, and fairly easy to set-up and mange.

[docwra]

I like Qnaps, I find the interface much nicer than synology.

The latest qnaps can also do over 16tb volumes, so you can do 4 x 10tb and get a 30tb Raid 5 volume.

[cabbresson]

+1 for Qnap

[UsefulG]

Re-reading the OP my understanding of what you are looking to do is this:

NAS 1 with x number of JBOD disks with a single partition on each one and then fill up each disk with media as required these would then be copied to NAS 2 with x number of JBOD disks with a single partition on each. Should NAS 1/Disk 1 fail you would replace with a single disk and copy the media back from NAS 2 to NAS 1/ New Disk 1.

The idea being that should NAS 1 chassis completely die you have x number of say Ext2 formatted disks which could be mounted by something else to recover the data. If the cost of NAS 1 and 2 is greater than an LTO 6 drive plus media then you will stick with the current situation and back up to tape to have restore points as required.

If my interpretation is correct then my 2 cents are:

Buying a QNAP or Synology and then not using the RAID functionality would be a waste of money when you could put together a couple of boxes with attached disks for less and put that towards your tape solution.

However have you considered how long it would take to recover from tape? Is that time to recover acceptable? If so, then it may suit your needs.

I went for a RAID 6 with 6 disks plus a second RAID 1 with 2 disks for other data IMHO the time to restore from tape would be too much for me. Hence the idea of a second NAS located in another geographical location where changes would be rsynced overnight. I'm aware that RAID is not a backup so kudos for thinking of rollback positions but I the cost of a second NAS plus disks comes to about the same as an LTO 6 drive and tapes plus my time.

[wpflum]

Re-reading the OP my understanding of what you are looking to do is this:

NAS 1 with x number of JBOD disks with a single partition on each one and then fill up each disk with media as required these would then be copied to NAS 2 with x number of JBOD disks with a single partition on each. Should NAS 1/Disk 1 fail you would replace with a single disk and copy the media back from NAS 2 to NAS 1/ New Disk 1.

The idea being that should NAS 1 chassis completely die you have x number of say Ext2 formatted disks which could be mounted by something else to recover the data. If the cost of NAS 1 and 2 is greater than an LTO 6 drive plus media then you will stick with the current situation and back up to tape to have restore points as required.

If my interpretation is correct then my 2 cents are:

Buying a QNAP or Synology and then not using the RAID functionality would be a waste of money when you could put together a couple of boxes with attached disks for less and put that towards your tape solution.

However have you considered how long it would take to recover from tape? Is that time to recover acceptable? If so, then it may suit your needs.

I went for a RAID 6 with 6 disks plus a second RAID 1 with 2 disks for other data IMHO the time to restore from tape would be too much for me. Hence the idea of a second NAS located in another geographical location where changes would be rsynced overnight. I'm aware that RAID is not a backup so kudos for thinking of rollback positions but I the cost of a second NAS plus disks comes to about the same as an LTO 6 drive and tapes plus my time.

You are close, I'm going to replace the current setup no matter what so one side of the equation is the cost of an NAS and the other side is NAS vs Tape. I haven't looked at the time required to recover 4 TBs of data from a drive but unless it's more than a few days it's not important.

It looks like both the QNAP and Synology NAS run around roughly 500 to 600 dollars for the base device and another 600 to 800 dollars for the hard drives so it's starting to look like tape might be in the same neighborhood.

As much as I was looking for a plug and play solution I just may have to go with home brew again and look for a rack case that can hold 5 drives and use Ubuntu server as the OS for the rack and put a tape drive in. I just went and searched on LTo-6 tape speed and it looks like they back up at a rate of 400 mb/s so backup/restore shouldn't be too bad.

Looks like the LTo-6 tapes are in the 25 to 50 dollar range as well so I'll be able to afford to do at least one complete backup for offsite without breaking the budget. It would be nice to know if the house would burn down that I'd have copies of all of the pictures and other personal data safe.

Thanks for the help.

[Loki69]

http://blog.brianmoses.net/2016/09/diy-n...-2016.html

this setup is great value vs a qnap

[docwra]

http://blog.brianmoses.net/2016/09/diy-n...-2016.html

this setup is great value vs a qnap

Hmm, My Qnap cost £200 + the disk cost, i'm not sure there is much of a saving there.

[gsmtech]

You could even use something like a cheap HP Microserver with multiple disks and install Xpenology...All the benefits of Synology without paying Synology prices