NAS Basics (Data Protection, Performance, Configuration and more)

Smurfin

Equally you can't protect most things from flood fire or theft.  Unless you're paying for external storage nothing exists on God's earth to protect you from the above.

I'm aware of all of the conventional thinking, and the whole "NAS is not a backup", but other than duplicating the NAS in another location there's no other way.  If you have a small NAS another drive is the easy and obvious solution (but still doesn't protect you from flood fire or theft) - my NAS is 14TB so not really feasible.

My backup is the hope that my NAS doesn't die

Kristian

So what's so expensive about having an external hard disk that you copy your NAS to now and again and then drop it off at your folks', friends' or relatives' place now and again?  That will cover you for FF&T

I would think that 14TB is not a usual amount of data for most people.  Obviously you've already asked yourself how much your data is worth to you.  The answer must be 'not much' as as you've got no back up   What are look at cost wise for another 14TB of storage, £1000 ? (10 disk unit with 10x 2GB disks?).  Have you looked at 2nd hand tape drives?

Smurfin

It would cost £1500 to back up the NAS.  I'll take my chances, most of the content I've got on optical disc anyway (but if it died I really don't think I could be arsed to re-rip everything again).

abraxus

I agree that there's no perfect way of making foolproof backups cheaply where large media collections are concerned, but steps can be taken to protect your most valuable data first and added to over time.

When I set up my first media pc I started out with 3 x 500gb drives (the largest available to me at the time). Since then I gradually upgraded to 1tb drives and now that 2tb drives are affordable will be moving to those. As a consequence I started to accumulate redundant 500gb (and soon) 1tb drives.

If the media is organised suitably these redundant drives are a good solution for relatively maintenance free (ie reduced need for constant backing up) and off site backup, so here's how I organise my films.

Regardless of the size of drive I'm using in my system I store my films in 500gb sized folders. In the first folder( let's call it Folder A) I put all of the films I least want to lose, the next important batch in folder B and so forth.

Regardless of how many folders I end up with a certain number of them (in my case probably all bar one or two) are unlikely to see any changes over time.

Once I changed my 500gb drives over to 1tb drives I copied folders A,B & C onto the now spare 500gb drives and dropped them off at my parents house knowing I'd never need to update these backups as those folders wont change.

As I gradually change from 1tb to 2tb drives, then folders D & E can be copied to the first spare 1tb drive and so forth.

I also have a folder or two where content does change, such as films I haven't watched yet, decided to keep or TV shows I'll watch once and delete. These I keep backed up using Mirrorfolder (daily backup) to a USB drive. Of course these files aren't protected from a fire or flood but in such circumstance I suspect I'll have bigger things to worry about and they're a relatively small amount, easy enough to replicate if the need arose.

I appreciate that this isn't perfect or suitable for everyone but the cost of gradually upgrading storage when the need arises and price points are right, and using the old drives for backup is far less painful. Additionally being able to back up most (at least the most valued) of your content as you go along is far more preferable than not backing it up at all because the cost to do so all at once is prohibitiive.

There are probably better ways and certainly for smaller collections such as my 40gb or so of music, and photo libraries there are increasingly affordable cloud storage options available but for now this seems to be the option that suits my needs best as it involves the least work on my part.

Chaihana Joe

Thanks for this, Abraxus. Perhaps not exactly what you were saying, but the idea of organising storage according to how urgently it needs to be backed up is food for thought.

Actually, in my case, because I use my NAS for media and work, my situation is the opposite of yours. It's the most dynamic, most recent data that is of most value to me. It wouldn't hurt too much for me to lose my Star Wars collection, whereas it would be a real pain to lose recent correspondence with clients. I don't use differential backups - I just can't bring myself to trust that it's doing what I think it's supposed to be doing. So I just copy by hand. This means that I copy the whole of the 'Work' share every time, whereas I will be much more relaxed about the 'Movies' share.

But it could be so much better if I had a way of automating the backups where I had complete faith in what was going on under the hood.

HMHB

I use a couple of free apps - SyncToy and SyncBack and once set up they will copy new/changed files only if you wish.

abraxus

Options for dynamic work really depend on what sort of volume you're talking about Joe.

I use a similar method to JohnG for most of my work stuff, except I use Mirrorfolder.

If your day to day work files are only a relatuvely small amount you may want to look at some of the various cloud storage options out there. I use Dropbox for my day to day stuff as it's free for up to 2gb of storage. The other benefit is that it syncs automatically and I can access these files from my phone and iPad as well.

ntm1275

Hi MikeK

My power consumption figures that Zarch has quoted in the guide, were only meant as a example of how to work out your own consumption figures, not to imply that all home based PC's were definitely going to use at least 200watts

I did say that I was using a 'mythical' number of 200watts and made an assumption that it may be on 24/7
But as an example from my own PC which has an Intel i5 CPU (which is supposed to be one of Intel's lower power CPUs), when I connect up a plug in power meter, this PC consumes 150watts/h at idle, during use this will rise to over 210watts/h

If someone was to have an older Pentium4 based PC which they wanted to use as a home built NAS, this is more than likely going to consume more power than my i5 PC, as the P4 was a notoriously power hungry CPU and needed hefty fans to keep it cool

Older PC components were not designed at that time with power consumption in mind, they were more interested is having the fastest component to beat their main rival (AMD v Intel or nVidia v ATI)

These days, having the 'fastest' component has gone somewhat out of the window, because more and more people are choosing products based on a compromise between power consumption and speed because of the high electricity cost involved (which will probably only get higher still in the coming years)

noddle

Is a NAS good enough as a web Server using ASP.NET code?

springtide

Just a FYI on power of a home NAS build...

I was running an ION based Atom 330 (dual core) with 2x 1.5TB Green SATA drives.. and power consumption was approx:

- 3 watt standby (S3)
- 35 watt typical
- 65 watt max (full load)

Server PSU is rated at 250watts - which obviously has it's own losses.

(power measured with a power measurement plug - and running Windows Home Server)

Typical performance from the Atom was around 50-60MB/sec (with green 5400rpm SATA drives)

Think the Atom processor has a power rating of 10 watts I think.

I have now upgraded to an i3 (with gpu) with a thermal rating of 73 watts.  But the processor seems to report typical power of around 35 watts.  Haven't used a power measurement plug on the i3 yet... so can't comment on actual power usage yet.

In terms of power usage on my Laptop (comparing OS's)..  Windows (7) seems to give me around 30% more battery life than Linux (Jolicloud).  I guess this is due to the more advanced power management drivers on Windows... so wonder how an OS like FreeNAS compares to say Windows Home Server.