09-08-2022, 07:00 AM
Hi there,
I'm an amateur (formerly pro) photographer, and research historian. My day-job is working in healthcare, and these are "very serious hobbies" for me -- My work as a historian helps support and recognize the work of a large international medical charity.
I've got several hundred GB of archived photos, another few hundred gigs of scanned books and archival material, and a few hundred more gigs of various... stuff... including backups of my wife's computer, old academic work, historical research... It's a long list... Much of it represents a decade-long photography career, and years of research-time. Nearly all of it is largely irreplaceable.
In total I have about 1 - 2 TB of data that is very, very important to me, though some projects I'm working on now could see that grow to 3 - 4 TB in the next year or two...
Right now, I have a small stack of ... 6-ish mis-matched hard-drives on the desk beside me that I manually copy things to to maintain backups, with a running Google Drive sync for about 100GB of offsite backup of the really important stuff... Everything is redundant across multiple drives, and it's just mayhem. It's clearly time to get a NAS...
Access speed is of moderate concern to me. I'm NOT going to be streaming anything (We just watch Netflix on our laptop in bed, and don't even own a TV!), but I will be opening, viewing, editing and saving, large files and large groups of photographs representing a few GB at a time. Ditto for large-ish (900MB+) PDFs. I also sometimes do video editing of educational video content, though I'd probably move what I'm working on onto a local SSD, and then archive to the NAS when I'm done.
Being able to access everything remotely while I'm on the road is a huge benefit to me, and while I can't do it right now, I suspect that once I can, it will become an essential feature to me.
Almost nothing I do is time, or up-time, sensitive, at least not compared to most IT infrastructure use-cases. I can usually tolerate a few days of downtime with a shrug and a "Well, guess I'll go work on some projects around the house." ... That doesn't mean I WANT downtime, but I'm not Google or AWS, and my head won't implode if I have to slow down to handle a drive failure or something. Again, long-term data-security is most important to me.
I live in a rural area with occasional (4-6 times per year) power outages, especially with winter storms. I can tolerate "Oh, my computer shut off, I lost a few hours of work" or "I came home to find my computer had rebooted itself" power outages, but I can NOT tolerate anything that will compromise my archived data.
Please remember that I'm a historian and nerd, not an IT specialist. I want to make these decisions now and then probably not think too much about my storage ever again, unless I have to restore/rebuild something, or upgrade in 5 - 10 years.
-----
I think I've settled on a Synology DS420+, mostly for the price-point and the four-bay capacity. I plan to run SHR (Or maybe even SHR-2?) for ease-of-use and data redundancy...
-----
SO... That's my use-case... And the NAS I think I'm looking at...
Now, my questions, sort of in reverse order:
1) Is SHR or SHR-2 the best option for me? I feel like these are more idiot-friendly than RAID 5/6? And more flexible if I want to upgrade individual drives in the future. Am I correct here? or am I missing something?
2) How will a Synology 420+ "at rest" (i.e. when I'm not around) running SHR/SHR-2 handle an unexpected power failure? How about mid-file-transfer? Or during other functions? I presume I'll be adding a UPS system to drive the NAS, but would like to know the answer to these questions...
3) How about if I have a power-failure mid-file-transfer?
4) What drives to populate the NAS with? I see so many options, and while I'm somewhat tech-savvy, there are so many possibilities to wade through. What actual physical drives offer a good blend of performance and reliability for this sort of use-case? From what I've read (mostly various analysis of the Backblaze stats from 2021), I feel like I should avoid Seagate drives, but beyond that, I'm again overwhelmed by the dizzying number of options.
5) What about file systems? BTRFS sounds like the coolest thing since sliced cheese. Is it really that good? Should I care?
6) How does this all work if/when things do actually go bad? I understand that SHR (or probably SHR-2) will provide data security in the event of a drive failure, but I'm not clear on how much of a pain-in-the-@ it is to recover from such a thing... (Will the software *warn* me when a drive fails? I presume so, but ... How often does it check? Might a failure go unnoticed for a long time, and have a second drive fail in the interim? )
If I have a drive failure and I'm running SHR, can I just pull the bad drive out, shove a new one in, and wait for it to rebuild/repair? Do I even have to push buttons? Go through a data-retrieval service? Or ?
7) I think an array of 4x 6GB (or maybe 4x 8GB, to give me room for growth) drives with SHR-2 makes sense to me... Does that sound right? Am I missing anything?
I have an approximate "comfortable" budget of $1000 Canadian Dollars, but that number is flexible. I have a decent-paying day job, and can easily work some overtime to save up a bit and get the right solution. $1500 is probably a sane upper-level cap.
Thanks so much for any and all input!
I'm an amateur (formerly pro) photographer, and research historian. My day-job is working in healthcare, and these are "very serious hobbies" for me -- My work as a historian helps support and recognize the work of a large international medical charity.
I've got several hundred GB of archived photos, another few hundred gigs of scanned books and archival material, and a few hundred more gigs of various... stuff... including backups of my wife's computer, old academic work, historical research... It's a long list... Much of it represents a decade-long photography career, and years of research-time. Nearly all of it is largely irreplaceable.
In total I have about 1 - 2 TB of data that is very, very important to me, though some projects I'm working on now could see that grow to 3 - 4 TB in the next year or two...
Right now, I have a small stack of ... 6-ish mis-matched hard-drives on the desk beside me that I manually copy things to to maintain backups, with a running Google Drive sync for about 100GB of offsite backup of the really important stuff... Everything is redundant across multiple drives, and it's just mayhem. It's clearly time to get a NAS...
Access speed is of moderate concern to me. I'm NOT going to be streaming anything (We just watch Netflix on our laptop in bed, and don't even own a TV!), but I will be opening, viewing, editing and saving, large files and large groups of photographs representing a few GB at a time. Ditto for large-ish (900MB+) PDFs. I also sometimes do video editing of educational video content, though I'd probably move what I'm working on onto a local SSD, and then archive to the NAS when I'm done.
Being able to access everything remotely while I'm on the road is a huge benefit to me, and while I can't do it right now, I suspect that once I can, it will become an essential feature to me.
Almost nothing I do is time, or up-time, sensitive, at least not compared to most IT infrastructure use-cases. I can usually tolerate a few days of downtime with a shrug and a "Well, guess I'll go work on some projects around the house." ... That doesn't mean I WANT downtime, but I'm not Google or AWS, and my head won't implode if I have to slow down to handle a drive failure or something. Again, long-term data-security is most important to me.
I live in a rural area with occasional (4-6 times per year) power outages, especially with winter storms. I can tolerate "Oh, my computer shut off, I lost a few hours of work" or "I came home to find my computer had rebooted itself" power outages, but I can NOT tolerate anything that will compromise my archived data.
Please remember that I'm a historian and nerd, not an IT specialist. I want to make these decisions now and then probably not think too much about my storage ever again, unless I have to restore/rebuild something, or upgrade in 5 - 10 years.
-----
I think I've settled on a Synology DS420+, mostly for the price-point and the four-bay capacity. I plan to run SHR (Or maybe even SHR-2?) for ease-of-use and data redundancy...
-----
SO... That's my use-case... And the NAS I think I'm looking at...
Now, my questions, sort of in reverse order:
1) Is SHR or SHR-2 the best option for me? I feel like these are more idiot-friendly than RAID 5/6? And more flexible if I want to upgrade individual drives in the future. Am I correct here? or am I missing something?
2) How will a Synology 420+ "at rest" (i.e. when I'm not around) running SHR/SHR-2 handle an unexpected power failure? How about mid-file-transfer? Or during other functions? I presume I'll be adding a UPS system to drive the NAS, but would like to know the answer to these questions...
3) How about if I have a power-failure mid-file-transfer?
4) What drives to populate the NAS with? I see so many options, and while I'm somewhat tech-savvy, there are so many possibilities to wade through. What actual physical drives offer a good blend of performance and reliability for this sort of use-case? From what I've read (mostly various analysis of the Backblaze stats from 2021), I feel like I should avoid Seagate drives, but beyond that, I'm again overwhelmed by the dizzying number of options.
5) What about file systems? BTRFS sounds like the coolest thing since sliced cheese. Is it really that good? Should I care?
6) How does this all work if/when things do actually go bad? I understand that SHR (or probably SHR-2) will provide data security in the event of a drive failure, but I'm not clear on how much of a pain-in-the-@ it is to recover from such a thing... (Will the software *warn* me when a drive fails? I presume so, but ... How often does it check? Might a failure go unnoticed for a long time, and have a second drive fail in the interim? )
If I have a drive failure and I'm running SHR, can I just pull the bad drive out, shove a new one in, and wait for it to rebuild/repair? Do I even have to push buttons? Go through a data-retrieval service? Or ?
7) I think an array of 4x 6GB (or maybe 4x 8GB, to give me room for growth) drives with SHR-2 makes sense to me... Does that sound right? Am I missing anything?
I have an approximate "comfortable" budget of $1000 Canadian Dollars, but that number is flexible. I have a decent-paying day job, and can easily work some overtime to save up a bit and get the right solution. $1500 is probably a sane upper-level cap.
Thanks so much for any and all input!
