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Locally accessible NAS all the way!

If someone else has your data (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox), is it really your data? You upload your files to these companies, and they'll mine your data free of charge. Hell, if you go above the 'free' (nothing in life is free) threshold, you'll pay them a monthly or yearly recurring payment for the privilege to spy on you. It's win-win-win for them.

I have an 8TB 4 bay Western Digital NAS (PR4100), after RAID is taken into consideration, there's 5.5 TB of usable space and three home computers in the mix.

Weekly Back Ups - Sunday nights starting at 6PM, spaced 2 hours a part I have Veritas set to do system backups of all three PCs to the NAS. I have an 8 week retention policy, One full backup followed by three incrementals, followed by another full and three more incrementals. If a file needs to be restored it's just a matter of opening up the Veritas Recovery Browser, finding the recovery point, entering in my password, and finding the file(s) I want to restore. Easy peasy.

Monthly File Copies - The First of every month a batch file gets executed on each PC that copies the entire contents of the My Documents and My Pictures folders to the NAS, overwriting the previous months. I have a folder in the root of the NAS called 'Data Backups' with subfolders for each one of my computers. Taking this one step further, these folders then get copied by executing another batch file to a private area of our File Server at work over a VPN tunnel. I don't keep many pictures locally (see below), so the file size for all of this is not as large as one would think. I take this extra step incase of corruption to the Veritas backup set.

Camera/Phone Backup - With my real camera, after an event, I'll pop the SD card into the computer, make a subfolder on the NAS with the Date and copy all of the pictures taken that day over manually If I am on a road trip, when I get back to the hotel, as long as I have a decent cell signal, I'll connect to my home VPN and copy the pictures over that night. I'm not too concerned about the pictures on my phone. Unless I have something I really don't want to lose I'll copy it over to the NAS right away. I typically perform two factory resets on my phone a year, once in the Spring and once after a new release of Android comes out. Prior to doing the resets, I'll copy all of the pictures to the NAS and delete the previous version of that folder. That way my Pictures are up to date and when the phone restore is complete, I just have to copy the DCIM folder back over. It is usually at this time, I copy all of the photos that originated from my camera and phone to a portable SSD (used to use a portable HDD). The SSD is encrypted with BitLocker and kept it in a locked drawer at work. All photos are in their full resolution 6000 x 3376 resolution.

From Work to Home - In the middle of the night, our small servers at work back up to my NAS at home for off site backups. For our larger servers, I physically take a hard drive and tape home with me every week and rotate them. For the smaller servers, it goes over the VPN tunnel. I'm a bad boy and don't utilize my Home Folder at work, so I do the same thing as I do at home. I have a batch file that copies the content of the My Docs and My Pics folder on my work laptop to my NAS.

In addition to personal files, I keep installers for ancient applications that I may or may never need again on the NAS. I play around a lot in VMWare, so that installer for Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP does come in handy from time to time as does that ISO of NT 4.0 and the installer for SP4a. I don't care about my VMs enough to make any additional backups of them besides what Veritas backups up weekly. All my music is stored on my NAS, I have none of it on my local computers. I do copy my music over to my offsite SSD that I keep at work when I copy my pictures over twice a year, and I also have a somewhat updated version on the flash drive in my cars infotainment system.

All of the extra steps I take are precautionary in case something happens to the NAS. Since it's RAID 5, I can have one hard drive failure, but only one can fail at a time before it rebuilds. I keep a brand new spare 2 TB WD Red in my desk drawer for just the occasion. Never had it happen yet. In all honesty, if my house burns to the ground, the last thing on my mind would be worrying about my pictures of the Blue Ridge Mountains or mist filled pictures of Niagara Falls.

For security, I have firewall access rules set up to restrict access to my NAS.

The only thing that can potentially get in my way in a cable (extremely rare) or power (more likely than it should be) outage. Having a secondary ISP to failover to is great if you're home, but when you are away, that VPN capability is broken, and if your secondary ISP uses CG-NAT, you are SOL. If there's a cable outage the router will failover to HughesNet on WAN2. If there's a power outage, the generator will kick on, and since cable will be out because Charter doesn't back up the nodes, the router will failover in this scenario as well. Problem is HughesNet, besides being barley usable sometimes, is the carrier grade NAT. If I absolutely need to access my NAS in the event of a cable or power outage when offsite, I could always contact my neighbor and walk them through setting up TeamViewer on my desktop PC and muddle through while on satellite. This is why we need IPv6. and why under no circumstance is '5G' an acceptable form of internet access to be used in the home as a primary method of getting online

If you skipped any of this long winded post, which I expect you did, bottom line, this is my data, I am in complete control. Not Google, not Microsoft, not Apple. I will never be subservient to those pigs.

EarDemon said:

Locally accessible NAS all the way!

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This post deserves it's own thread by itself. I'd love to be able to do the off site mirroring you do, but unfortunately Spectrum in our area doesn't have the speeds to support it. If fiber ever makes it here it might be a different story. On a good day I only get 11 megs up. You did bring up a lot of ideas I need to consider though to improve my own setup.

cpalmer2k said:

This post deserves it's own thread by itself. I'd love to be able to do the off site mirroring you do, but unfortunately Spectrum in our area doesn't have the speeds to support it. If fiber ever makes it here it might be a different story. On a good day I only get 11 megs up. You did bring up a lot of ideas I need to consider though to improve my own setup.

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For my file transfers back and forth from work to home and vice versa over the tunnel, I'm actually limited by my speeds at work. We have 25 Mb symmetrical DIA fiber from Spectrum Enterprise. Nothing I can do to convince the powers to be to upgrade to 50 Mb for $200/month more. At home with Spectrum Gig, I'm at 940 x 40, so work is the weak link in the chain for me. That's why I have all of this scheduled in the middle of the night.

Another thing I considered was enabling RAID on my new laptop, it supports RAID 1 using two NVMe SSDs. Between causing the write performance to take a hit and having to spend $800 on two 2TB NVMe SSDs, I couldn't justify it. And then ultimately, I'd convince myself to get another drive to keep in storage collecting dust to act as a hot spare, so add another $400 to that cost. Right now I've got two 1TB drives in there, but don't want to go down to 1TB of usable space.

EarDemon said:

Another thing I considered was enabling RAID on my new laptop, it supports RAID 1 using two NVMe SSDs. Between causing the write performance to take a hit and having to spend $800 on two 2TB NVMe SSDs, I couldn't justify it. And then ultimately, I'd convince myself to get another drive to keep in storage collecting dust to act as a hot spare, so add another $400 to that cost.

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This is way beyond the needs of someone looking to back up a few years worth of pictures, videos and music files.

Right now I've got two 1TB drives in there, but don't want to go down to 1TB of usable space.

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You probably don't want to go above 75% of capacity with an SSD. I'd go so far as to say that anything that you dont use fairly frequently probably shouldn't be on an SSD given that the price per gigabyte is still 30 times that of a conventional hard drive.

It is always good to maintain perspective.

The current pricing may be beyond what people are willing to pay, but the concept is exactly what people need. Hardly anyone backups up their data, those that do, don't do it on a regular basis. So why not throw in an extra M.2 slot, stick an SSD in there, put in a RAID controller with RAID enabled by default? Even using the mainstream 2280 size these things don't take up that much space especially compared to the traditional 2.5" form factor and they weigh nothing. And even if you make regular backups, there's the example above. If Cpalmer had RAID on his computer, never would have an issue with potentially losing a 20 page report after leaving the computer alone for 10 -15 minutes.

Besides cost, this concept will never take off because of having the practices of non-serviceable hardware and soldering the drive to the board. Afterall you would need easy access to the M.2 slots to replace a failed drive. This is why I am done with consumer grade hardware. The ability to do the most simplest of tasks such as adding memory or replacing a drive is slowly being taken away.

The price difference between mechanical drives and solid state drives isn't worth the aggravation. Hard drives don't need to exist anymore for typical desktop/laptop end user use. They should be relegated for high capacity Server/NAS/SAN datacenter, NVRs and home media server use . The only mechanical drives I have anywhere in my house are the ones in my NAS and the ones in my DVRs. My two desktops, the older one dates back to 2007, the new laptop, the old laptop, the beater laptop I bought for cheap on eBay and my work laptop all have SSDs with at least a capacity of 500 GB. I have not purchased a computer for work with a mechanical hard drive in two years, and all WIN 7 -> WIN 10 upgrades involved me pulling the HDD, and putting in a 512GB WD Blue SSD that cost $70. I don't even own portable hard drives anymore.

The performance of filling up of a solid state drive and to what threshold is a debate that's been going on forever. I might have been worried about it 10 years ago, but these days, I don't see it as a huge issue. I don't have a lot of data, I don't plan to fill them up to capacity. That's my I have multiples. My main desktop has 3 500 GB SATA SSDs. C: for Windows, applications and data, D: for Virtual Machines, E: for audio/video/photo files as I experiment with Adobe CC. Same goes for my laptop, but with 2 1TB NVMe SSDs with the option to add a third 2.5" SATA. C: for Windows, applications and data, D: for VMs and A/V files for play back and editing.

I put Intel 730 Series SATA SSDs in my main desktop, work laptop and old personal laptop the day Window 10 came out, so nearly 5 years ago. These machines have been in use nearly every day since and in the case of two of the computers, they hardly every get shut down. There has been no noticeable performance degradation.

EarDemon said:

The current pricing may be beyond what people are willing to pay, but the concept is exactly what people need.

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SSD is needed for speed and weight savings, not for gobs of storage. Storage inside a computer is hardly safe from the typical accidents that befall data.

So why not throw in an extra M.2 slot, stick an SSD in there, put in a RAID controller with RAID enabled by default?

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Because there are cheaper and much more secure ways to back up a computer?

If Cpalmer had RAID on his computer, never would have an issue with potentially losing a 20 page report after leaving the computer alone for 10 -15 minutes.

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In that particular case, yes, but if the problem had been ransomeware rewriting all the directories (much more likely than a hard drive failure), it would have taken out both drives.

The price difference between mechanical drives and solid state drives isn't worth the aggravation.

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How much is an 8TB SSD (hint: its on the shady side of $900)? You can get an 8TB winchester USB drive for under $140.

While the piddly drives (128GB, 240GB and 512GB) drives are getting affordable, drives those sizes are arguably a waste of real estate outside the realm of a truly personal computer.

Of course RAID won't help you in the case of lost or damaged files. It's just another layer in a multilayered approach for data integrity to cover for different scenarios to protect against data loss. Just because other ways exist doesn't make it any less valid to use. Why not go all the way and take it to the extreme and say why should there be RAID on servers? After all, if cryptolocker spreads through network shares, drive redundancy isn't going to make the aftermath any better. Servers just sit there in datacenters, they don't get moved around and banged like laptops. That's another compelling argument for having no redundancy on them, correct?

I gave examples of where large capacity hard drives are still needed, but as time goes by, prices will still continue to drop, while technology gets better. Here are my major SSD purchases from the past 5 years. Twice the capacity for the same cost and faster interface.

July 2015: Intel 730 SATA @ 480 GB - $240
July 2017: HP S700 Pro SATA @ 512 GB - $215
Dec 2019: WD Black NVMe @ 1 TB - $230
Dec 2019: Intel 760P NVMe @ 1 TB - $220

I personally wouldn't want an 8 TB SSD unless it was a part of an array. I don't like the idea of putting all that data in one spot even with backups. There is a reason I went with two 1 TB drives, instead of one 2 TB drive. And in regard to laptops, last I knew there wasn't a 2.5" mechanical drive on the market larger than 4TB. The 14TB WD Gold is under $500 on Amazon. If you need that kind of storage a mechanical drive is the only way to go. But very few people benefit from that amount of potential storage. Now stick in a couple 512 GB or 1 TB SSDs, configure for RAID 1, and it has the potential to benefit a lot more people for roughly the same cost.