04-06-2023, 11:42 AM
Hi Rich!
You and many others (me included) often get blinded by the concept of "future proofing" something.
If you are new to NAS then decide what you like to use now, and maybe within the next 6 months.
Don't think to much about what happens several years down the line.
If you do the above after having watched and sought input about what you need now the rest will take care of itself.
5 years down the line if you find that you want to do more things with your NAS you would probably want to buy what is new at that time instead.
Also bummer with your photos.
You have probably heard or read this many times: "Raid is not Backup".
The ones that most often repeat this are people that have suffered data loss on their NAS even though running Raid-5 (or any other raid level that provides redundancy).
So having a NAS running with disk redundancy will protect you (in most cases) from mechanical failure of one or two drives it is not backup.
If you have, for example, a personal or family account of Microsoft's cloud offering you can setup syncing to the cloud and have a backup that way.
Some reading of the manual will be needed so that you understand the syncing and what gets deleted where and when - some of it configurable.
So returning to the future proofing (perhaps contradicting myself a tiny bit), the only thing I would recommend is to perhaps lean towards NAS units that will allow you to expand the RAM in the future.
You and many others (me included) often get blinded by the concept of "future proofing" something.
If you are new to NAS then decide what you like to use now, and maybe within the next 6 months.
Don't think to much about what happens several years down the line.
If you do the above after having watched and sought input about what you need now the rest will take care of itself.
5 years down the line if you find that you want to do more things with your NAS you would probably want to buy what is new at that time instead.
Also bummer with your photos.
You have probably heard or read this many times: "Raid is not Backup".
The ones that most often repeat this are people that have suffered data loss on their NAS even though running Raid-5 (or any other raid level that provides redundancy).
So having a NAS running with disk redundancy will protect you (in most cases) from mechanical failure of one or two drives it is not backup.
If you have, for example, a personal or family account of Microsoft's cloud offering you can setup syncing to the cloud and have a backup that way.
Some reading of the manual will be needed so that you understand the syncing and what gets deleted where and when - some of it configurable.
So returning to the future proofing (perhaps contradicting myself a tiny bit), the only thing I would recommend is to perhaps lean towards NAS units that will allow you to expand the RAM in the future.
My systems:
DS1821+, 10 Gbit NIC, 32 GB RAM, 5 Exynos 14 TB (1 spare on shelf) | DS3612XS, 10 Gbit NIC, 12 WD RED 3 TB (one hot spare)