So being data safety paranoid person, I went to purchase a NAS off the shelve, lucky PBTech had an incorrect price labelled, and I was able to pick up the Synology S215j for $299 incl GST.

Installation was pretty easy, just insert 2 identical HDDs to form a RAID 1 configuration, then screws in. Setting up the system was a mix bag.

Slow, very slow file transfer

I was trying the “DS Cloud Station” which allows you to have feature like Dropbox, and it will sync the folders to the NAS automatically. Nice idea, but doesn’t work very well with OSX. What I have found is that the file transfer speed was painfully slow. And it appears to me is that, Synology doesn’t know how to handle OSX packaged files properly, let’s say Photos library, in OSX it’s treated as a file when you copy inside the system, but when you sync to the NAS, it copies the inner files individually, therefore it creates a lot of network overhead.

Also in DS Cloud Station, there is a settings to keep versions of the files, and according to the forums it seems it stores 2 versions of the file which in result using more disc space than you thought.

If you run OSX at home, I think backing up via TimeMachine feature from the NAS is your best option.

How about disaster recovery?

I was running headless CrashPlan client in my old NAS, but that Java program uses a lot of RAM. My new NAS only has 512MB so I am not going to run that service on it.

So… what now, what if my house if burgled/fire damanged and all my data is gone? Right now, I am using a 2.5inch HDD to perform regular backup of my TimeMachine on NAS. And leave it in the car. The chance of losing all of the HDDs at once is pretty low.

Original setup and problems:

1. I have a couple of Macs at home, both using TimeMachine for regular backups.  I didn’t have a TimeCapsule to centralise the backups, so 2 separate external hard-drives were used. The problem was I had to remember to plug the TimeMachine HDD regularly to perform backup, and had risks of HDD failures
2. Since there are 2 different standalone backups, I cannot push them to the cloud backup service using a single account.

Building a in-house NAS server

Hardware:

I had a 8 years old PC laying around, it has a Core 2 Duo (64bit) and 2 Gb of memory. I bought a couple of 3TB Western Digital Green Drives for the RAID 1 setup.

Software:

Initially I have tried FreeNas project but later I realised it’s not a poor man’s choice, basically it’s using ZFS and it’s very resource hungry.  I ended up using OpenMediaVault It’s a linux distro based on Debian, so you can use apt-get to install different packages outside of OpenMediaVault package.

OpenMediaVault includes a few plugins which allows you to provide Apple File Protocol, which enables TimeMachine backups within the network, also FTP, Rsync etc etc

Cloud Backup

Having mirrored drives might reduce HDD failure impact but still doesn’t prevent hardware being stolen or damage in fire. Originally before setting up the NAS server, I used BackBlaze on my Mac, but the problem is it only runs on Mac, and it can only run on a single computer, so my wife’s laptop was not being backed up to the cloud.

I have made a switch to CrashPlan, which has a build for linux so I use choose the shared folders to push to the cloud.