Been juggling a few different backup solutions in my home, limping by on scattered USB drives and an old Time Capsule that we've outgrown. Don't want to spend the money on a full NAS like a QNAP, thought it might be cheaper to trick out an old USB3 RAID enclosure to handle Time Machine backups from 4 Macs (2 desktops, 2 laptops) so it's just one, central device.
The plan:
The plan:
- Swap out current HDDs (very old 500GB Hitachis I think) and replace with 4x 2TB or 1.5TB drives which should cover all of my machines with room to spare.
- Plug the RAID into a Wireless Hard Drive adapter and then into my router, essentially turning it into a NAS.
- Mount on each Mac and set it as the Time Machine destination drive.
- Are Red or Green HDDs best for this application? I don't think I need the speed of the Reds just for Time Machine backups.
- Should I format as one big Raid or JBOD and have 4 individual disks, one per computer? Which config is best for Time Machine? (I ask because the Time Capsule didn't care how many Macs you backed up to it as long as there was room).
- If I go RAID, should I still partition it so that each computer only mounts a specific volume for backup?
- IS THIS WORTH DOING, or is it a waste of time? I'm trying to reuse my current gear as much as I can, but with the cheapest 1.5TB drives I can find I'm looking at around $224 for all the parts – which is the same price as a 6TB MyCloud drive. Which would obviously be easier but I've had a MyCloud fail before and I really don't trust those.
