First NAS

[Enquiries]

I currently have 8 staff using Apple laptops in and out of the office (hybrid since Covid). All connections are wireless. We use Dropbox for all our files which is £150 a month. We all like the fact that Dropbox is just like any other folder on the computer . Sometimes we have the files on the laptop and sometimes leave it in the cloud. This is expensive and doesn’t back up emails so I’m looking at hosting it myself with a backup at my home in case of complete loss at the office. The internet is fast enough for us all to upload and download to and from Dropbox (fiber in official and about 70 download at home) I have no idea where to start. I had a chat with some guys at qnap. It would be good to have Time Machine backups too. Thanks

[TribalHound]

Hi - sounds like a little up front investment could save your business a lot in the long run, and put you in more control of your data.

I'm going to make an assumption that at £150 a month you're probably managing under 5TB of data and with 8 staff, you probably want a little headroom for the future as well.

Starting with your backup solution, since you're in / out of the office you have two choices.
a) HDDs (enclosure / portable) - simply leave one plugged in at the office at all times, backing up overnight or actively during the day via USB / Thunderbolt port with no network speed impact. When you go into the office, unplug it and take it home, but plug another in it's place. So you can rotate 2 or more and then you're never going to suffer more that a few days of data loss in an 'extreme' scenario.
b) Get a 2nd 'cheap' NAS (of the same brand as your office one) and set an active sync between the two for critical shared folders & a scheduled (out of hours) sync for the rest. I suggest this method as you don't want to choke network / internet bandwidth when users are working during the day, but at the same time critical data needs updating more than once a day.

Now onto the 'real solution'. Both QNAP and Synology brands support Apple Time Machine, so for your laptops there's a built in solution. With 8(+) users active you're going to need some bandwidth (and switches / cabling to match in the office).

Synology is more user friendly that QNAP, which requires more interaction and a higher technical know-how. But since all your users are using Apple products Synology may be a better fit.

I think of Apple as simple interface, just does what it's supposed to with no fuss - just like Synology. Microsoft OS and you're getting a little more technical, a bit like QNAP and then there's Linux & TrueNAS - the geeks choice.

In terms of choice - if 2 bay is all you need then the DS220+ or DS720+ would be your best choices. The 720 has the edge as it has twice the cores & you can add M2 SSDs for caching files that your users access the most, so speeding things up quite a bit. Both are capable machines, but the 2 bay route might not be ideal if you want to be using data access and backing up 8 Macs at the same time.

In which case you'd be leaning towards a 4 bay NAS. So recommendation would be the DS420+ or DS920+. Both have M2 SSD cache capability, but the 920 has a greater RAM expansion capability and again, the 920 has 4 cores to the 420's 2.

Of course, with the 4 bay versions you could always decide to start with two disc and expand capacity later on. Or, both the 720 & 920 support adding an expansion unit at a later date.

Lots to consider, but I hope this information has been useful. If you do want to get more 'tech involved' then QNAP has a minefield of permutations in the 4 bay range, but as it's a first NAS and you're all Apple users I figured best to keep it slightly more simplified so you can deploy as quickly and effortless as possible and start saving on those dropbox subscriptions. Which you may end up downscaling and keep to backup some critical files as another recovery option.

All of the above are desktop units for two reasons. A smaller office typically doesn't have rack mount servers and secondly when the NAS gets a bit older and you replace it, you can unplug it and take it home as your off-site backup solution. For many years, every time I've bought a replacement main NAS I've demoted the older one. Currently my main NAS does all my daily stuff & runs virtual machines, the 2nd does all my cloud syncing & backups & the 3rd just gets sent files to store safely with no access remotely & lives in the garage roof space, away from the house.