T i m wrote:
On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 20:06:23 +0100, Brian Reay wrote:

snip


'Putting together'?

Yes: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/di...h/put-together

I was trying to get a handle on the level you were going down to.

Scratch building from a drive, perhaps a R Pi and some software, or
assembling something from a mix of junk box parts/units and may be new
bits, or something else. All are perfectly good ideas. Ive tried several
of them myself.




I've used a couple of methods to provide a NAS and Timecapsule (for Mac)
services (R Pi, PC based..), tried Western Digital units, and now
Synology. The latter is by far the best.

Because?

Mainly convenience and features. While the Synology has a mass of features
Im not currently using, there are several I can see myself using at some
point.



For home use, I went for dual disks in a RAID config.

Why? Ok, I can see if you needed something available 24/7 RAID1
(presumably) might give you that but what if the system hardware
fails? Also, what are you doing for the backups of the NAS itself?


That is the idea of dual disk RAID. If a drive fails you can recover the
data.

If the actual box fails, who made it doesnt matter that much. It needs
repairing or replacing.


If I want I can
access it from anywhere but I've not enabled this feature.

That was something that daughter might need and felt might be easier
to sort if some commercial solution came with the DDNS function via a
'My Cloud' sorta solution.


That is also one of the features I can see myself using. Ive used it in
the past with my other solutions but dont need it at the moment.



I've also got a single drive system I use in the motorhome. It also has
most of the clever facilities although I don't need to use them.

I installed and configured a Synology DS218j for a friend and once we
had sorted the DOA WD 4TB Red drive ... it sorta went Ok but the UI
was a bit confusing and non intuitive. And this was with someone who
knew what he wanted and what to expect etc?


One of mine is the 218.

Some bits of the UI could be better but, all in all, it is pretty good in
my view.

I run PLEX on mine and it €˜feeds media (video and audio) to various TVs
and Wi-fi enabled radios. I used to run a Linux hosted version on an old
PC but this is part of the convenience factor I mentioned.




User/admin interface to set up etc is straight forward. There are a
range of apps they can run, including Plex on the dual system (it has a
faster uP), even Apache so you could host a website from it, although
I've not tried this.

Understood. I have scrolled though the list of plugins (or whatever
Synology call them) and some of them looked quite interesting.

My main once would be whatever instigated a complete 'bare metal'
level backup of a Windows client PC on a daily basis but not sure
there is such a thing?

Based on suggestions offered by others here previously, I'm probably
going to order a Synology DS119j and duplicate the entire box across
the LAN to something (OMV probably) running on a Shuttle or RPi.
'Duplexing' (SFT III?) across two devices should give even better
availability and resilience than RAID1 in a single box? It also might
be the only way I could ensure daughter actually backs up her NAS. ;-)

Cheers, T i m


The one I use in the motorhome is a 119. As you know the 119 only has one
drive so, if it fails, that is it. You can use your approach but it it
seems like a lot of hassle. The drives tend to be the weak spot and even
they arent bad. Your idea is certainly workable. Better is a matter of
opinion. While I enjoy tinkering, there are things I want to work
seamlessly in the background without needing intervention etc. The NAS is
one of those.

My 119 isnt used for backup, well not really. It is just a media store-
essentially I copy (nearly) all of our media library on to it and it feeds
the media system in the motorhome. Useful when in bad weather ;-) I
recently bought Senior Management an Amazon Fire Stick ( there is some
comedy series- Mrs Mazel? - she wanted to watch) and it works beautifully
with the 4G Wi-fi, Kodi, .....

BTW, WD seem to have lost the plot with their NAS drives. I have one which
is fine*, it must be 5 years old at least. It is dedicated to a particular
project now. When I wanted something for the motorhome, one of those with a
larger drive, would have been ideal. Sure enough they seemed to still sell
them, minor cosmetic differences but obviously the same series it
seemed....

The UI was a nightmare. Once the shares were set up they would drop off the
network willy nilly, everything was geared to setting up a personal cloud.
The old version offers remote access- which I have used in the past,
although I preferred my Linux based server- but it doesnt dominate the
operation.

*World Book series or something similar. They are style to look like books.