I have a 2 bay buffalo NAS configured in RAID 1 (1TB total) that is full. I back it up on an external 1.5TB USB drive. I'm needing more storage and am leaning towards a 4 bay. I would still like to back up my NAS as well and know that going too large will make backing up to an external USB really expensive. Any suggestions on what to get and how I could potentially utilize my existing NAS in my backup architecture? Love your website and videos by the way. Thanks for all the info!!!
Thank you for your kind words! Based on your needs, I would recommend the Synology DS420+. It is a 4-bay NAS that supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10, which provides various options for redundancy and performance. It also has a powerful quad-core processor and 2GB of DDR4 memory, which should be sufficient for your media playback needs. Additionally, it has two 1GbE LAN ports, which will allow you to set up link aggregation for increased network performance.
As for backup, you could potentially use your existing Buffalo NAS as a backup destination for the DS420+. Synology's Hyper Backup application allows you to back up your data to various destinations, including another Synology NAS, an external hard drive, or a cloud storage provider. You could set up a scheduled backup task to back up your DS420+ data to your Buffalo NAS, which would provide an additional layer of redundancy.
Keep in mind that you would need to ensure that your backup destination has sufficient capacity to store all of your data, as well as a reliable backup strategy to ensure that your data is protected in case of a hardware failure or other issue.