[NA] What are you using for external digital storage?

[flyingcheesehead]

If you get a BeeStation, please give us a PIREP. The cloud interface looks interesting.

The geek in me wants to get something with at least 4 drive bays.

The realist says that the BeeStation Plus would be just fine, especially because my existing solution is older than Bryan's and isn't really working right any more, and even though it's a single drive it offers encrypted cloud backup for $120/year so is probably one of the simpler/cheaper ways to get a true 3-2-1 backup in place.

On the other hand, the UGreen DH2300 ($199) plus a pair of 8TB drives at $189 each gives more capacity and redundancy, and comes out to about the same price. Unfortunately it seems like the cloud backup piece is a little more involved.

 

[schmookeeg]

I'm on what must be an 8? 10?-year-old supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T which is amazing in this use case. I thought they'd be cheap on ebay and easy to recommend, but they're stupidly expensive for some unknown reason -- hard to blame "AI" on that

I wish I knew of a more recent spiritual successor with 4x hot swap bays, modest and low-wattage CPU, and a pcie for adding an HBA if you outgrow the thing. the xeon 1500s were really great in their little niche.

 

[DaleB]

The former server infrastructure nerd in me really wants to pick up something like a used Dell or HP 1U server with 8-10 hot swap bays. I won't though, for the same reason I don't pick up a Cisco POE switch. I'm not willing to put up with the fan noise. Even though it would be tucked away in the basement, I've gotten less and less tolerant of things like that over the years. One of the last things I is something sounding like a small jet taxiing in the house.

 

[Larry in TN]

Synology is..., then forget it exists.

That's how mine has worked for me. I don't recall any difficulty in setting it up, as Wilkersk described. And the ability to type "find.synology.com" into my browser, instead of remembering an IP address, is nice.

I didn't know that Synology was restricting drives to ones that they have approved!

Reminds me of how locked down Apple was (is?). I guess it increases reliability. I thought they were only doing that for the higher-end systems?

 

[JimBirk]

Reminds me of how locked down Apple was (is?). I guess it increases reliability. I thought they were only doing that for the higher-end systems?

Yeah, 2025 and newer higher-end Synology models (the "+" models) were requiring Synology branded disks--it sounds like that's no longer the case. What a bad marketing decision that was. I would not have chosen Synology if I was locked into their more expensive drives. I'm glad I avoided that episode of the Synology story.

 

[Albany Tom]

Unless things have changed a lot, you want 4 drives min, so you can do striping and a hot spare, so it can recover with redundancy if one fails, and so that you're not just doing simple mirroring so you get better efficiency from the drives. Past that I don't think more helps a lot, because the whole thing can still go sideways if the backplane or controller fails, and it'll wreck everything...ask me how I know, and with much bigger systems.

Goes without saying you ideally want something separate offline and either scheduled or manually replicated, too, so that if you're ever hit with a ransomware attack it won't automatically and very quickly encrypt everything. Big drive on a shelf works fine to protect against that scenario.

 

[UngaWunga]

Goes without saying you ideally want something separate offline and either scheduled or manually replicated, too, so that if you're ever hit with a ransomware attack it won't automatically and very quickly encrypt everything. Big drive on a shelf works fine to protect against that scenario.

Why would you make your home personal storage system available to the internet? That sounds like a horrible idea.

 

[Albany Tom]

Why would you make your home personal storage system available to the internet? That sounds like a horrible idea.

Where did I recommend anything about Internet or cloud? I said separate offline backup.

 

[Skip Miller]

I just did a quick google search for portable multi-terabyte drives. You have options. I'll let you do your own googling. Enjoy!

-Skip

 

[flyingcheesehead]

If you get a BeeStation, please give us a PIREP. The cloud interface looks interesting.

Well, curiosity got the best of me and I ordered a BeeStation Plus (8TB) directly from Synology. 60 bucks cheaper than if you get it from Amazon.

It goes against my geek nature to get a single-drive NAS, but at its core the BeeStation allows for one of the simplest full 3-2-1 backups possible, and do I really need RAID if I've got 3-2-1? Probably not. That, plus the purported ease of use, personal cloud, and the fact that I *really* needed a new backup solution pushed me over the edge. I was still using a Time Capsule at home that was not only full (and thus not backing up a long timeframe any more) but also had gotten warnings that future OS releases wouldn't support it. BTW, one way to get really good at data recovery is to have terrible backups.

The unit itself is a bit larger than I expected. I guess I was basing my expectations off of an external hard drive, but this thing also has a whole computer in it so the size isn't surprising. It's still reasonably compact, though. Another assumption went out the window right away: I was hoping to directly connect it to my laptop to speed up the initial backups since my home WiFi is also still on said Time Capsule, 802.11n. But, the USB-C port cannot be used for direct connection, it's there for adding external storage.

They give you a QR code and a URL for the setup. I went to the URL on my laptop first, clicked through the first few steps that lead you through creating a Synology account (they also take Google and Apple), plugging in cables and powering on, and... "Can't find your BeeStation." I figured maybe I had entered the serial number wrong, but after double-checking and replacing the 0 with an O, still nothing. I tried with the QR code (which includes the serial number) and it still failed. Oh good, I guess I still get to be a geek for a little bit. Digging into it a bit, I installed Synology Assistant (available for Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu) on my desktop and still no dice. I ended up plugging the BeeStation directly into the Time Capsule instead of a hub that was plugged into the Time Capsule, and what do you know, it worked.

I was prompted to hold the power button for four seconds "until it beeps". I'm not sure exactly what that does, but then it prompted me to update the BeeStation, which took about 10-15 minutes. Next, it offered to activate the three-month free trial of their cloud backup service, BeeProtect, which is $120/year afterwards. That's part of the 3-2-1 and its automatic nature is great for me, so I did that. They also include a 3-year license for Acronis True Image, but I'm gonna stick with Time Machine. Next, they go through "Recommended Setup" which is a cool way of letting you keep control of things, but explains exactly what they recommend for setup and why.

Somehow, the "8TB" BeeStation Plus ended up with a listed capacity of 6.98TB after setup. I'm used to drives showing up as less, and of course a NAS has an OS and software on it as well, but to lose a full terabyte seems a bit excessive.

After setting it up, I dropped back into Finder to start getting things moved over. While it showed up, it would not connect. It seems SMB is not on by default and isn't part of the "recommended setup" so I enabled that and was able to connect locally.

And now... I'm copying a 1.51TB sparsebundle backup from the Time Machine over to it, and hopefully I'll be able to inherit that backup and keep it moving forward from now. That's going to take a while, though.

 

[Albany Tom]

I can't read this without being distracted by "beestation". Does this make you a bee keeper?

On a serious note, make sure and check twice that smb isn't exposed to the Internet at all. As I'm sure you know it's a protocol that's only safe if you don't let anyone access it at the network layer.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

I can't read this without being distracted by "beestation". Does this make you a bee keeper?

I'd better add a honey pot to the network while I'm at it then!

On a serious note, make sure and check twice that smb isn't exposed to the Internet at all. As I'm sure you know it's a protocol that's only safe if you don't let anyone access it at the network layer.

Absolutely.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

I was *not* able to copy the 1.5TB sparsebundle over the wifi network using my laptop; even before it failed (twice) it was predicting 12 days to complete and I've gotta take the laptop off site before that.

New backup is about 69% complete after 26ish hours.

 

[Shepherd]

My NAS is an Asustor AS6704T with qty 4, 8 TB drives, maxxed out RAM and SSDs.
I've got 641 movies, 669 albums, 36 TV series (2014) episodes, 273 Flying videos and 10,875 photos.
You can't watch 360 video on the NAS, yet.
It gets backed up to a Cenmate 4 bay drive in a RAID configuration.
The Asustor hardware works fine, but the operating system could use some refinement.
Also, I do not allow external internet access. Reference "the operating system could use some refinement."

 

[flyingcheesehead]

The oddest thing happened...

After my laptop successfully backed up to the BeeStation, that appears to have cleared some sort of logjam and it successfully backed up to the Time Capsule again.

I also have doubts that it even finished the backup to the BeeStation, because it's starting an hourly backup right now and claims to have found 1.2 million changed files...