I am looking into getting my own NAS (network attached storage) for the house basically my own cloud but saved to a hard drive inside the house. This storage will be used for 95% cell phone photo/video back up.

My requirements are:

-1TB of data (I really don't need any more).
-Two bays of storage so I can back up the backup.
-Auto backup of my phone.
-Separate accounts so my wife and I can backup our phone data independently.
-Compatible with both Iphone and Samsung
-Remote access to files, App based
-Preferred to be around $250

Edit

-I want to be able to delete items from the phone or cloud independently. This is a big issue I have with Google Photos is deleting one deletes the other.

Are there any recommendations for a system? Are any brands better or worse than others?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: gpbst3,

This might be a good place to start…

https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=70

Not sure it’ll fit ALL your needs, but this is the best brand going, IMHO.

Newegg - $179.00

Backup strategy while simple in concept can be complex in implementation.
NAS units for the most part utilize a simple Linux embedded OS that function with apps.
QNAP, Synology, Austor, WD, Buffalo are all capable.
I am a QNAP partner but the others are decent depending on requirements.
My only advice it to be careful, very careful of any of their apps that sync to their Internet Storage or whatever.
They ALL have been subjected to hacks including ransomware.
I believe those vulnerabilities have been plugged but I would be very careful on using.
Using a local (LAN) solution, I would not be concerned.
I would have less concern of an direct online phone-to Internet sync of data with for example: Google or One Drive.
You could deploy both a local and online sync as the more the merrier with backups.

Good Luck

I use the Synology ds723+. it has many features that you may not need now but may want in the future. Also has a great OS/user interface. works well with either Mac or PC machines. I use mine for a combination data storage device and Plex home media server using 6 TB Western Digital Red drives. The system can use SSD or SATA drives in either size you wish (can afford). mine is holding over 1000 movies, thousands of scanned photos and 400 music CD's plus backup for the families iPhones and Macs.
Recommend you watch some You Tube vids regarding NAS setup, configuration and use. always buy a lot more drive space and memory than you think you need (like gun safes).
NAS Compares makes great review and setup vids on you tube.
My whole system total cost was approx. $1400.00 and I did all the setup and configuration and population of data.
System: Synology DS723+. $400
SNV3410-400G SSD. $150 x2
Synology D4ES01-16G ram 16GB. $400
WD RED Plus 6TB WD60EFPX SATA drives. $125 x2
I am very satisfied with the performance so far. we had a lightning strike a few weeks back and lost the internet gateway that the system was attached to. it didn't do anything but scramble some user ids and passwords, no physical damage. its a good sturdy system that's user friendly.
I do not recommend the Easy systems that are already setup for you they have poor reviews and no flexibility. Any other questions re this setup fire away.

I've had good luck with the Terramaster NAS.

https://a.co/d/5Trr9Yl

Just make sure you put NAS drives in it.

Like smschultz said, backup can be more complicated once you get into it. It’s not quite as simple as copying your files somewhere.

QNAP and Synology are the big players. QNAP will get you better hardware for your money, while Synology will get you a better software experience. It’s like QNAP=PC, Synology=Apple.

Your $250 budget won’t permit this, but I would recommend a four bay solution. This way you can have a type 5, 6, or SHR RAID. This gets you the advanced btrfs file system with its scrubbing, snapshot, and replication capabilities. This can protect your data from bitrot. A second drive in RAID 1 is NOT a backup of your backup. Don’t forget to factor in a UPS for your NAS.

I love my Synology NASs. I use them like crazy. For example, I use Synology disk station as a Dropbox solution. In fact, I use it to circumvent Dropbox’s three device restriction on free accounts. I set the Dropbox folder as the disk station team folder on every PC, so the NAS keeps those folders sync’ed, and as long as one computer is active on Dropbox, it will keep that service sync’ed as well. Very convenient.

If you want a budget friendly Synology to do what you listed, look at the DS423. Although I dislike the choice of chassis, it is capable enough for your use. A DS423+ would be even better. Two GB of RAM is plenty if you aren’t going to virtualize.

quote:

Originally posted by gpbst3:
I am looking into getting my own NAS (network attached storage) for the house basically my own cloud but saved to a hard drive inside the house. This storage will be used for 95% cell phone photo/video back up.

Are there any recommendations for a system? Are any brands better or worse than others?

What is your plan for backing up the NAS?

Sure, a RAID mirror makes it safer, but nothing is 100% safe. Better have a backup plan for the main box too. Also, think through your recovery steps if something gets onto a backup that you don't want to retain (e.g. a trojan on one of your devices could well be saved in an archival backup forever even after you have cleaned it off the device).

WRT to various vendor offerings, Synology appears to be the market leader. I have played with a Synology for a client and was not particularly impressed. FreeNAS/TrueNAS seems to be superior (from reading specs, etc. I have no hands on). The latter is open source so that is a plus if you are willing to go through somewhat of a learning curve. I find FOSS (Free Open Source Software) to be generally better designed, maintained, and supported than commercial offerings.

Realize that most NAS vendor's "value-added" is in the web-based control application. Under the hood of practically every commercial NAS I've looked at is an open source OS (Linux or BSD), supporting software (Samba, and the networking stacks in the parent OS), and a open source web server (Apache, NGINX, etc.) In other words, you can easily build your own from scratch (at a considerable savings in cash outlay) if you are willing to manage it from the command line, or can live with an X Windows-based desktop. Putting together a reliable, amply-provisioned disk sub-system of sufficient capacity is the biggest challenge you might face. Note that commercial NAS vendors haven't completely figured out this area themselves.

Have a Synology DS920+ (4-bay) and a DS220j (2-bay) that are used for computer backups, Plex and iPhone photo/video automated storage. Computer backups go to both units on a rotating schedule while all cellphone photos & videos along with Plex files are synchronized between the two in case of any non-recoverable failure on the 4-bay. Too expensive for your suggested budget though; the DS920 was $450 by itself with no drives.

-I want to be able to delete items from the phone or cloud independently. This is a big issue I have with Google Photos is deleting one deletes the other.

A local system is stand alone meaning you manually edit and transfer the data. I do not allow my system access to the internet so all functions are manual. it is possible to configure the system to be be accessible via the net and sync with other devices but I don't use those functions so they are turned off. sigcrazy could probably answer the question better.

Synology diskstation allows you to choose to leave files on both devices or only on the server. As does the DS Photos for the pictures on your phones.

As for brands, I think that has already been addressed. If you want to get in the weeds, you can buy a NAS chassis, a micro ATX motherboard, download free NAS, and do a complete build from the hardware up. You can use Linux apps to do what you want. Lots of tinkering and Unix command line fun.

If you want a packaged, set-it-and-forget-it solution, then you probably want a Synology solution. QNAP would be somewhere in between, leaning more towards the Synology end of that spectrum.

If you want to go with a budget model, give Terramaster or Asustor a look. What to avoid? Don’t buy a used Drobo.

My solution is three NAS units. A main 4 bay DS920+. It replicates itself to a nearby DS418. Then there is another offsite DS418 that the 920 replicates itself to daily. This is how I achieve my 3-2-1 backup scheme (3 copies, 2 media types, 1 copy offsite). Technically, I don’t have two media types, but I’m confident that a bunch of EXOS hard drives will not all fail at once. My super critical data (Quickbooks files) live in a Dropbox folder as well, so that’s five copies.

The offsite Synology will only accept a connection from a single IP address, which is the address of the other server. My solution is a bit expensive, but loosing my business data or having it ransomwear’ed would be more expensive. Loosing Mrs sigcrazy7’s pics of her grandbabies? Well, there’d be no recovery from that! Lessee, what is the value of half my assets?

In today's world, a terabyte does not require a NAS.

A pair of separate matching multi-terabyte drives would be cheaper and just as good.

The price sweet spot today is about $150 for an 8 TB drive

Costco had a 14TB plug-and-play backup storage for a $150 holiday sale. They have sold out online but the stores still had some last week.

If you don't want to depend on one drive get 2.

I used to run several different NASs on my home network.

Now that I can buy 8-14 TB drives set up to connect to the network for less than 1 NAS housing I have gone to these.

I would only get a Seagate or Western Digital.

YMMV

My overly simple system is a pair of portable solid state hard drives. It isn't as 007 as an auto backup cloud yadda yadda but it's not like you're backing up top secret info or fortune 500 business records.
I have both connected to a usb-c hub so when I plug a phone or laptop up they just show as two storage locations. Easy peasy.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...n_title?ie=UTF8&th=1

Using external hdd's is a much less expensive way to store data and do simple backups. the nas gives you other access options and more user friendly presentation of the media. a decision about what you want will determine the direction you take. as with most endeavors a spectrum of options exist. the more you learn about the systems the better you will be at finding your sweet spot on the spectrum. I have found that my choices were just about right for me but would be inadequate for others and overkill for some. I have no business needs or critical data this is all just for retirement fun. make sure whatever you choose is upgradeable and expandable because your needs will change over time.

I have one WD My Book World Network Attached Storage for home and one for the office (~$300). You can configure it to be accessible from the net, but we just use them as local devices. They are a mirrored HD in an enclosure. I dump file copies on them periodically when I want to clear out my phone, or backup files.

I’m running TrueNAS on an older computer. I think I’m running 6TB in it. RAID 1. Or whatever ZFS calls RAID 1.

For a long while, I just used a USB 3.0 external hard drive plugged into the USB 3.0 port on my WiFi router as network attached storage. This was before iPhone and tablets invaded our house, but all of our laptops and desktops would back themselves up to that external drive. All I had to do was map a drive to it in Windows on each computer.

quote:

A pair of separate matching multi-terabyte drives would be cheaper and just as good.

No, not even close. Your external drives are using what file system? NTFS? EXT4? Win32? None of the file systems used on external enclosures will support versioning or parity correction that you get with a B-tree system like btrfs or ZFS, AFAIK. Storing data on external drives is only better than nothing. Certainly not better than a NAS.

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:

quote:

A pair of separate matching multi-terabyte drives would be cheaper and just as good.

No, not even close. Your external drives are using what file system? NTFS? EXT4? Win32? None of the file systems used on external enclosures will support versioning or parity correction that you get with a B-tree system like btrfs or ZFS, AFAIK. Storing data on external drives is only better than nothing. Certainly not better than a NAS.

Serious question sigcrazy, for non-commercial home backup, isn't NAS a bit of overkill? For a commercial business there is no substitute for a NAS but home use seems a bit less critical. Currently I back up to two different external drives and I see both of them failing at the same time as a hard drive failure on my computer extremely remote.

quote:

Originally posted by Bytes:

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:

quote:

A pair of separate matching multi-terabyte drives would be cheaper and just as good.

No, not even close. Your external drives are using what file system? NTFS? EXT4? Win32? None of the file systems used on external enclosures will support versioning or parity correction that you get with a B-tree system like btrfs or ZFS, AFAIK. Storing data on external drives is only better than nothing. Certainly not better than a NAS.

Serious question sigcrazy, for non-commercial home backup, isn't NAS a bit of overkill? For a commercial business there is no substitute for a NAS but home use seems a bit less critical. Currently I back up to two different external drives and I see both of them failing at the same time as a hard drive failure on my computer extremely remote.

One of my bigger concerns is with data integrity. Many people believe that if the drive mechanism is working, then the files written to it are just fine. Unless they aren’t. Bits get flipped all then time. Data gets corrupted, even if it is on a working drive.

I have a habit of not throwing out old hardware. Indeed, I have two IBM 5150s and a couple of 5160s sitting in my office, all functional. Anyway, a few years ago (before my extensive backup schema), I lost some pictures of my son on the beach. I knew they were on my old Netware 4.11 server in the attic. I drug it down and fired it up, and with satisfaction watched the old 486-66 server come to life. After finding another computer that supported IPX/SPX, I had a working client and mounted the volume.

I found the missing pics just where they should be. They had been on that drive for twenty years. However, when opening the jpg files, they were all messed up. Colors off, half of pics black, etc. The data had degraded. Degraded data is not something you will know about until it’s accessed.

This is why all my data now lives on file systems that are self-healing. I don’t care to have bits flipping in financial data. Pics are one thing, but small corruption in other files is hard to detect. So I guess it really comes down to how much you value your data. To some people it is irreplaceable, so it being non-commercial is not really relevant.

As an interesting side note, the data on the aforementioned PCs on the IBM full-height, 5.25” 10Mb hard drives are right as rain. I guess the data tracts on something that huge are so generous that the data integrity is more robust. That old IBM hardware is massive.