Here's my story:

Have a Home Theater PC in my living room with around 3tb worth of movies and about 500gb worth of data I want backed up (kids photos and such). Right now I have a USB 1tb drive thats like 5 years old and runs fine, but I know I'm playing with fire and loosing all my kids photos. I also run a automated backup for these photos to my laptop, so I do have a tiny bit of redundancy,  but not enough to make me feel good.


Here's what I'm looking for: NAS to back up my important stuff, and act as a media server to stream movies to the Xbox One and the HTPC. I'm fine with a bare server and buying my own drives. Is Synology a good product? I'm a fairly technically saavy guy, but I'm in new territory and I don't wanna buy junk and potentially lose my data. Lets say my budget for the NAS itself is $300 max, and I'll pick up drives when there's a good deal for something reliable (probably in the 4-5tb range), with RAID 1.


I'm ok with setup time, but I want to set it and forget it's there for the next 3-5 years while it does its business. Not have to tinker all the time.


Suggestions?

Synology.



Do it.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FWURI8K/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=1N0I7JQAUPRW2&coliid=IQUIC5EWRP5C8&psc=1




 

Synology works well, and is pretty easy to manage. If you are a bit more tech savvy, you can easily repurpose an old PC into network attached storage using freeNAS or similar...there are also benefits to running Windows based storage devices, like the ability to run Plex Media Server and having a familiar interface. Although, I believe there are Plex clients for NAS devices these days

I have a DS411, but i'm sure it will work just fine for you if a mirrored setup is what you want.

Want to do it right, start here.

Get an HP MicroServer and run FreeNAS off a USB drive and fill it with 5 or 6TB drives. Run them in Mirrors. You don't want to rebuild a 20TB RAID Z.

Critical data really should be backed up both onsite and offsite.

He speaks the truth. I do have a Synology NAS that is backed up to Amazon S3. I also have a backblaze account running on my computer as well.

 

I would start with backbaze as a good starting point and decide on the NAS later.

3TB Mirrored raid 1 with about 70% used. I keep all of photos, data files, and Music and videos on there. I don't back up and of the music or movies or the syslog server that's running.  176GB of data storage is $4.25/mo on reduce redundancy storage.
When I rebuild my desktop I am going to add a 4 or 6TB Drive and create a share on that drive and backup to that with the Synology software. Then use backblaze to grab it all.

 

Guys:

Everything I see on Backblaze is that it just backs up everything.

Is it possible to point it at a specific folder or drive and say "back that up and NOTHING else?"

Synology is good stuff, but QNAP is my goto now, great gear and great software and community forum.

I don't think you can do that with Backblaze but you can with Crashplan.

It is but it would be a pain. you would have to exclude everything else on the control panel.

 

+1 for an offsite backup.

$300 could buy 6+ years of unlimited backup you don't have to worry about

I started using CP a year or two ago and it ended up being the solution we use at the office now. Of course they're stupid and only backup the Windows folders, not your valuable data.

At home I run a mix of CP, automated local backups via TimeCapsule, manual backups to an external drive, and DVD burns.

A couple thoughts:

I'm in agreement with the necessity of offsite backup.  I use Crashplan (to back up to the cloud and to a local drive).  


If you're already going through the trouble of putting together a server or a NAS for media, I highly recommend checking out PLEX.  A plex server will stream not only to the HTPC and the xbox, but also to phones, tablets, and remotely via a web interface (a la netflix), all while converting the media as needed for each client and to lower bitrates if necessary.  The downside is that you need some CPU power to make that transcoding happen.  Something like this (thinkserver TS140) for $225, plus a small SSD for the OS, maybe another RAM stick, a pair of mirrored spinny drives for media, your choice of server OS, and you're in business.  It's not something you want to put on display as it's an ugly case, but it'll do great as a server to handle both media streaming and backups.  I really can't overstate my love for plex--it's like my own personal netflix with rips of every DVD we own as well as recorded TV shows that I can watch anywhere.

It's easy to specify by hard drive, uncheck c:  check f:, etc...

btw +1 for backblaze

Plex is great and it's part of FreeNAS. You don't even need an SSD for the OS. Small USB drive will do fine for a boot drive. I'd really recommend the HP MicroServer over something like he TS140. It's very quiet and has a low power draw. The dual core xeon model should handle transcoding without any issues. It also is a nice looking little box.

The DS214 will run Plex.





https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/154329-synology-armv7-platform-support/



Do you have any DLNA compliance devices? Synology has a DLNA media server.





 

 
While that's true, you pay out the nose (comparatively) for a pretty and prepackaged solution like the HP Microserver.  

Drobo works well too.  RAID5 with hot-swapable SATA disks, Gig-E connection.

Came in to post this. Have a rack mount I set up at work and 411+ at home, also doing 1080P IP surveillance.



A buddy of mine has a 212 like you are looking at. He loves it.





 

I don't mind paying an extra $200 to have something that can run silently in my house and provide the power I need. iLO card is a nice bonus too. No more looking for a monitor when I need console access and virtual CD drive is great for installs.

unraid.  i've been using it for five years.  love it.

+1

I have Plex installed on my FreeNAS server.  Have two Roku's for the TV's and can access Plex and all the streaming services any time.

Here is a pic of the inside of my server. It's an old quad core AMD processor with 16 gigs memory. I throttled down the CPU and removed the video card to lower power usage since it runs 24/7. I access it through the web interface on my home network.   IT has six 2Tb drives running in a ZFS raid. I also use it for PC backups, but also have a 5Tb USB drive that everything is backed up on once in a while.

I use a few different NAS drives to backup important files and stream media.

To backup media and stream it to my Roku, I have a ZyXel NAS 320 with a pair of 3TB WD Red drives.  I probably should have gone with a RAID setup but I've never set that up so went the easy route.  Drive 1 stores all of my backups and streams.  Every night a job runs on the NAS to synch up the folders to drive 2.

My wife's work files are backed up in real time to a 3TB WD MyCloud.  Every night that NAS drive backs up to a 4TB WD Elements drive attached to the USB port.  Nightly, her work files are backed up 3TB WD MyBook USB drive attached to the Asus router.  Weekly her files are backed up to a Buffalo LinkStation with a 3TB WD Red drive located at a family member's house about 15 miles from here.  I use dynamic DNS from DYN.com to communicate to that NAS via FTP.

I also have an older Buffalo LinkStation and a Hawking NAS that I need to put back into rotation when I get a chance.

We looked at the cloud storage options but they would throttle down the uploads at a certain point.  We calculated that it would take about a month to load just her data to Carbonite.  If she needed it then it would take just as long to repopulate a new drive.  That was not acceptable if there was a project deadline.  Monthly, I clone her laptop's drive via a USB to 2.5" SATA adapter so that if her working drive fails, I can have her up and running in 30 minutes.  I can restore backups over the network in under an hour.

I use a combination of both Western Digital and Acronis backup software.