Offsite/Transport NAS

[KalanHowse]

What are my options or advice for transporting a NAS (Synology718+) home from work everyday so my various devices can have an offsite backup? Transport will be short 5min and in theory I don't see a problem with taking it with me when I leave work.

I've recently started in the printing/design industry. My uncle who worked here amongst many other male relatives setup our current Synology NAS for archiving etc. This is a local working device used for accessing old jobs.

I'm wanting to purchase a 718+ to run TimeMachine on multiple Macs as well as on a few PC's... their work folders and printing settings/data NEED to be safe if a fire or any other disaster occurred. Which is why I’m wanting to take this home or better still, walk it to another room and put it in a fireproof safe.

Thanks for your possible input.

Note also that I live in Australia, decent upload speeds are rare and we need to utilize what we have to send emails throughout the departments. (admin, prepress, press, bindery and dispatch) No section of the building can afford to wait, so I think this is my best option.

 

[cruisin]

Why not have each location have its own NAS and have a separate drive to use to sync all the NAS devices? Should be easier to lug around a smaller drive and i don't think the NAS devices are meant to be transported often.

If the single NAS is your whole backup for multiple offices you don't really have a backup solution. If something happens to the single NAS can you recover files if a office has a problem at the same time?

 

[KalanHowse]

Why not have each location have its own NAS and have a separate drive to use to sync all the NAS devices? Should be easier to lug around a smaller drive and i don't think the NAS devices are meant to be transported often.

If the single NAS is your whole backup for multiple offices you don't really have a backup solution. If something happens to the single NAS can you recover files if a office has a problem at the same time?

That sounds like a decent suggestion/solution, though currently, I do not have my personal iMac running so no computer will be able to connect to the second NAS at home to perform the file sync.

The single NAS I have at work here currently is only a working digital archive. Every job and file that has ever been printed or needs to be archived is first burned to 2 DVD's, put through an archive log program for easy file searching and then put into the NAS for day-to-day access... which for the record is used numerous times a day by myself and another person in my department. The DVD's which are stored in a fireproof safe are then our backup if a fire, or dare I say flood occurs.

Thank you,

* I updated my original post after also posting on Reddit and fixing a few vague parts.

 

[sunvizon]

it really helped me, thank you for the comprehensive and accurate information

 

[cruisin]

That sounds like a decent suggestion/solution, though currently, I do not have my personal iMac running so no computer will be able to connect to the second NAS at home to perform the file sync.

The single NAS I have at work here currently is only a working digital archive. Every job and file that has ever been printed or needs to be archived is first burned to 2 DVD's, put through an archive log program for easy file searching and then put into the NAS for day-to-day access... which for the record is used numerous times a day by myself and another person in my department. The DVD's which are stored in a fireproof safe are then our backup if a fire, or dare I say flood occurs.

Thank you,

* I updated my original post after also posting on Reddit and fixing a few vague parts.

Burned DVDs are approximately good for 5 years in dark conditions I believe (unless you use those archival DVD discs but they are relatively new and untested for long periods). Long term storage has mostly converged on tape (see Amazon Glacier storage, it is all tape). If you don't want to use tape, then at least put it on two hard drives and keep it very far away from your NAS (to prevent damage from fire or break-ins). The safe is fire rated for minutes in an average fire (kind of like a thermos), so you better not keep the safe in a large building that might take a while to extinguish. SSDs are useless for long term storage due to needing to be connected to power to maintain storage integrity. You will still need to periodically check for corruption as no storage is immune, just resistant.

A common idea is to keep your backups in a bank deposit box, as it doesn't cost much for a small box and it is highly resistant to fire and theft. Or sometimes people use cloud services for storage. You can even keep it at home as it is a reasonable offsite location. Simply make sure that everything useful exists in at least two places, and anything important (or would cost money to recreate it) exists in at least three. Consider also the cost of saving money on backups when you are storing things that are expensive to replace/recover.

Also remember the weak point of the NAS is the NAS itself. Even if the drives don't fail if the NAS fails your data is gone unless you get another NAS of the same model (unless you are not using RAID in which case you can likely get the data back, or you are handling the drawbacks of a NAS separately). And the NAS is a live copy which doesn't protect from overwriting and deletions (or power surges), so technically your current backup is the two DVDs of suspect durability. In the age of the cryptolocker malware, you need good storage that is not connected to a computer.

Also keep in mind that you might want versioning eventually, as it is sometimes useful to get a file as it existed beforehand.