Help evaluating an NAS solution
 

I know there have been multiple threads regarding backup and NAS solutions, but I am torn as to what direction I should be heading.

I need to build/determine the most reliable and easy-to-maintain NAS solution at my parents place. Currently they have an old (Athlon XP 1800) computer running two RAID1 drives on a cheap PCI SATA controller on our wired gigabit network. It's a fake raid (proprietary controller) on XP with some network shares. I configured their computer (workstation) so they save all their documents and pictures to this drive. I also have an external USB2 hard drive attached to that machine that I use for sporadic backups.

The setup today is running fine, however I am afraid of the effort required to maintain this with my being away. Given the file server is an XP machine every so often it has to be rebooted, for auto-updates, or whatever. Also, the fan on the motherboard is starting to die out provided the machine is old.

I see going down the path of one or two options

1) DLink DS-323 NAS device - where I would take the drives, reformat them, and use the DLink device to do its thing. I know RAID1 is not a backup, so what I would do is attach the external USB to one of the workstations (computers run 24x7 in our house) and do a backup of the shared location.

2) Retain the home grown NAS and install FreeNAS - or other Linux based software, repair the broken fan or put in another motherboard in the computer, attach the external RAID1 directly to the file server and set up rsync and backups. This would provide a more robust and faster solution, plus given it’s a Linux based kernel I presume it would be stable and not require intervention like XP (i.e. auto-updates)

The following are the requirements:
1) Easy to maintain - as I am not available and my parents are not computer I would like to limit the amount of interaction that may be required with the set up.
2) Redundancy - to keep the data available in event a single disk fails
3) Data Safety / Backup - this I will accomplish with the 3rd disk doing the backups.
4) Ease of replacement - in a case on disk dies, I would like a simple interface so I can guide them how to rebuild the array.
5) Scalability - in case we add more drives or need to increase the size of the shared platform.

Most of the data will be pictures, videos, and Word documents.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!

My solution? mozy.com.

Windows Home Server. This is the exact set of problems that WHS was designed to address.

WHS:

- Provides data redundancy by duplicating specific shares that you set to be duplicated. It's a simple checkbox: If you configure a share to be duplicated, then WHS duplicates the data on the share to another physical disk
- Scales up as you add drives. Run out of space? Simply go buy another disk (internal or external), install it, and reboot. WHS will see that you've added another disk and it will ask you if you want WHS to use the disk for data duplication. Say yes and you're done.
- Installs a client on all of your PC's that will automatically back up your PC's to your WHS
- Allows you to remotely access your WHS administration screen via the Internet for troubleshooting / configuration
- Has a fair amount of 3rd party partners working on add-ons. For example, on mine I have a router control add-on that shows me a graph of my historical data usage of my Linksys router. I also have a bit torrent add-on that will automatically start downloading as soon as I drop a torrent onto a specific share
- Allows you to publish and share photos, videos, etc to the Internet

In my opinion, WHS is an awesome device. As I mentioned earlier, your problems were it's exact design goals. It was designed to address families with multiple PC's that need to be backed up, easy to add storage, and easy enough for an average user to administer.

I would strongly recommend one of the Synology NAS devices. I use a DS-207+ (http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS207+/index.php) with 2 x 500Gb drives in a RAID 1 configuration, it has been 100% reliable. Virtually silent device, very easy to configure (they just brought out a big upgrade to the web management interface) and configurable to do all the things you need to here.

You could re-use your existing hard drives (or just get 2 new ones, since they are so cheap now) and have the whole thing set up in a couple of hours. Far neater than dealing with a Windows-based system that needs regular maintenance, patches, etc. The only time I've rebooted the Synology device is when I've upgraded it for new functionality, which is an important difference. It regularly runs 3-4 months at a time without being touched.

My solution is to use a NAS server for backup, and backup up the My Documents folder of each user and computer in the house to the NAS server dally, weekly, and monthly. It has worked well for the last two PCs that have died; I've recovered everything I needed on the replacements.

Karen's Replicator is a simple and free way to back up data. It just copies from source to destination, and either can be a local drive, a mapped network drive, or a a UNC folder.

The only thing I don't like about Karen's Replicator is that it is not automated enough ... ideally it would run scheduled back up jobs without prompting. However, as long as I'm logged in, and then switch to another user, the utility reliably backs up.

There are many NAS on the market. I have had a few over the past 5-6 years. Here is my requirements:

1. No client SW requirements.
2. Good spin down mode.
3. Gigabit ethernet interface.

Everytime I opened the box and read that a client SW needs to be loaded to work, I would box it back up and return it. There is no need to go thru this trouble.

Spin down mode is very important for home use since accesses in an home environment is actually very small. This prolongs the life of the drive and save power too. This would eliminate all the PC based solutions.

Gigabit ethernet came last and I've only had it in the last NAS box acquired. With a gigabit ethernet switch, 11n access point and GE port on newer PCs, GE port on NAS only make sense.

The first few boxes were Tritton SOHO NAS. This box worked very well but went out of production. An early Maxtor Shared Storage failed. Now I have a Maxtor SS2 with GE. This box has an USB port to connect a backup drive.

You can configure Windows to spin down drives as part of the power saver settings.

It still may not be the best option out there based on other issues, but the spin-down option on the drives is available.

We used FreeNas in our small office. Piece of cake to setup, easy -- real easy to maintain. Never had any problems with it -- we used an old PC as the server.

Also pretty good is NasLite (serverelements.com) -- it costs about $25 but also a real treat to work with.

Why bother with NAS
 

Maybe I missed something, but I only see one computer in the mix. If this is the case it could be easy to give you the protestion you are looking for easlily and cheaply. If you are thinking about upgrading the machine anyway consider a MB that has onboard RAID (like the Intel and other boards). You then setup a Raid Mirrored configuration between two drives. How I would do this is actually I would setup two raid pairs with 4 drives. THe 1st 2 drives say 320 to 500GB eSata drives (should be less than $100 each) for the OS and software. The other two drives would then be in there own mirrored pair for their data or shares as you called them. This would give them protection by having the 2nd copy, and availablility if one of the drives fails in either set the machine keeps going. Another added benefit is performance since you are no longer going over the network but through a PCI-Express bridge chip.
Just my two cents.

And, Windows Home Server does not require a software client to be installed. The client is only if you want to leverage automated backups.

Your PC's can access shares on WHS just fine without the client being installed.

Sure, then that computer must be on. The beauty of a NAS is that it is always on and still consume very little power, until an access is ordered.

Conceivably a laptop can be configured with Wake On LAN acting as a NAS and still draw very little power. But the wake up time will be long. I do set spin down timer on my laptops.

When I access my NAS, I still have to wait a little for it to spin up. But it is acceptable to me. There are situations where a dedicated function is better than a general purpose computer and I feel this is one of those.

QUOTE]Maybe I missed something, but I only see one computer in the mix. If this is the case it could be easy to give you the protestion you are looking for easlily and cheaply. [/QUOTE]

There are going to be multiple client machines, workstations and laptops who will be sharing this. I would like to also set up external access to the shared files to access photos and other items if needed.

The Linux based DLink DS-323 seems very popular. Do you have any experience with it? The only requirement it does not fulfill is the USB to backup, though I presume it can be hacked (USB is primarily avail to be a printer server).


This seems like a good device but a bit over my budget ($200). (twice as much as the DLink).

Maybe without justification, but I think I will try to stay away from MS products for this one, I know that you cannot group them all in one bucket, but between Windows updates, viruses, etc, I prefer to keep the NAS on Linux or other open-source.

?
 

WHS doesn't do RAID IIRC.

What is your primary objective? Is it simply local pc backup and restore capability?

1) Sharing of files across a number of workstations;
2) Those files to be safe in event of a hardware failure
3) Maintainless process for the system performing 1 and 2 above.

I will set the workstations so documents are all saved to these drives and all pictures, videos, and other media files are available there. Thus the loss of the independent workstation hard drives is less of a concern that the above.

Thanks!

It is not traditional RAID but the data is stored in multiple places such that the failure of a single drive doesn't cause a loss of data (in theory). I am a rather strong opponent of software RAID - including the WHS sort of approach - as the chances of a software failure are higher than the chances of a hardware failure and the recovery steps are likely to be more troublesome. But that's just me.

I realize that you said you're not interested in WHS, but WHS meets the criteria you're looking for. I'm just saying ;)

Another thing to think about. You mentioned viruses as a concern for the Microsoft platform. You're going to be storing data on your NAS from your Windows laptops / desktops, correct? Do you plan on running antivirus software on a Linux NAS? Your real virus exposure is in the data that you're storing on the NAS, and if you're not running an A/V solution on the NAS to scan the data that you're storing / sharing on it, then you're leaving yourself exposed.

I would just go with a simple NAS, 1TB, and then a back up THAT backup either direct to that NAS - many do this. Most NAS will offer such software to essentially backup the NAS to another USB drive even connected to it. I have a couple from Iomega that do jus this.

It won't be RAID, but it would be much less expensive. The Iomega ones also offer remote login and access, like the western digital ones do too. It costs something like 45$ a year after 3-6 months free, but then YOU TOO could access the files and check on the backups

They all have internet access?
just go with an online back-up\sync solution

Carbonite, mozy, Adrive, livemesh, live skydrive, sugarsync or the like

A couple of issues with that. There is lots of data (about 300-500 gig worth) I presume that the only backup services do incremental uploads so it would not be a problem to back it up there as well. Secondly, the privacy of data, I mean the digital photos and videos detail our lives month to month for the last 7-8 years. Thirdly, what happens if one of these services goes under, maybe not tomorrow but 5, 10 years from now?

Thanks!

That there is the biggest concern, IMO. A few online storage providers have gone under in the past, literally overnight, leaving their users completely helpless.

Now I understand
 

My mistake I thought you meant that multiple machines was a option you were exploring not that you already had. I have setup the WD NAS box for a few people. They use the 1TB system (2x500GB drives), which we setup in a mirrored pair (500GB available). It connects to the router with Gig-E, and can even be wireless (but slow this way). No software is required for windows or mac. If everyone using this can see everyones data you are done. If not then you need to setup access controls. But since this is home use just create a share (folder) by user name.

different
 

The only way to have file and folder and data duplication on the WHS is to set it up that way, as essentially a within the tower multiple backup strategy. The drives are independent, and they are not redundant if setup as shared storage. So, if one doesn't specifically say, keep DRIVE A, separate from the DRIVE B and C aggregate storage pool, and then also specifically says backup folder 1-10 on drive A, ALSO on the shared storage pool, then if drive A fails, you will lose the data. This drive is not spanned across any other drives in WHS.

I have four drives in the tower, disk 0 (original and OS disk) and disk 1 and 2, in a pool of 2.5TB. Then, disk 3 (the fourth in the tower) contains backups of essential data that I had designated as needed to backup. If disk 0 fails, I am SOL as for the OS going down. I cannot just pop in another disk 0 and be back up and running.

so, it isn't really as great as RAID CAN be, but it is also much faster and more specific.

I'll give you "more specific" since you actually choose what you want to have drive-independent redundancy on, though that can be a bad thing if you forget to choose the data you want protected.

The one I'm not at all sure of is "faster." How is WHS faster?

As for protecting the OS volume, it just depends on whether that is on a RAID volume or not; WHS and a traditional RAID storage solution are the same in that regard. My current solution has a stand-alone boot volume and RAID 1 for my data. If the boot volume dies I'm down, but I haven't lost any data. I'm OK with that.

That first Level 0 backup is a killer though.

300-500, ouch !!, you'd go broke paying their fees too. And,winkydink is right about that first backup

truecrypt is your friend

possibly out of business, no answer for that one

HDV MPEG2 files are a killer.

FreeNAS has been my fav. workgroup server solution for awhile. Flexible, price is right. Performance isn't the best, but it's been fast enough where I've deployed it. I have quite a few of them out there. Can't remember the last time I've had to do any real maintenance on them. Sadly, I find FreeNAS shares via Samba (Windows Sharing) better than Windows does. One of those "just works" solutions, despite not being as fast as some of the other NAS solutions out there. Then again some of mine are running on PII-400MHz computers.

I definitely understand the high gig requirements. I have 8 TB of internal drives on my FreeNAS. It gets used as a server and once a month it does a differential backup to a FreeNAS box at one of my data centers. Every so often I'll manually carry a few 1TB ESATA drives between the two machines and do full backups of a few drives at a time.