Are there NAS systems with removable drives optimized for backups?
March 30, 2019 4:11 PM   Subscribe

I am looking for a backup solution for my freenas server. Backing up to another NAS over Ethernet seems like it would be the most effective way to do so. However, a NAS as a whole is hard to store off-site and most Consumer NAS systems do not seem to allow easily swapping drives all the time. Do you know of any NAS systems that are designed to constantly swap hard-drives for backup purposes?

I am storing most of my data on a Freenas server (the freenas mini XL). I currently have about 5.6 TB of data, but my data pool is continuously growing as I do a lot of photography. Pretty much all of the data on my NAS is important to me as the majority of it are my own photos and the rest are important scans or other documents. My freenas is set up with RAID 10, providing a decent data protection, but we all know that just relying on the RAID is insufficient.

I am struggling to find a good way to back up my data. I am not keen on using cloud backup solutions - it think there is too much of a risk of critical data falling into wrong hands or cloud providers making changes to their plans. I would therefore vastly prefer to do local backups with off-site storage so I stay in control of the data and the backups.

The Freenas mini XL only have USB 2.0 ports, which seems way to slow and painful for using regular external hard drives for doing backups. It therefore seems a much better option to do backups over my 1GB ethernet connection instead. In order to do so, I would need to use another NAS device.

As I would like to store the backups off-site, I have been looking for NAS systems that have easily removable hard-drives so I can swap them out and rotate the drives for backups. Although many Consumer NAS's do hot-swapping, most of them do not seem to be designed to have their drives constantly swapped for back-up purposes. I did find this one solution from an unkonwn vendor, highly reliable systems, which seems to fit the bill, but very little information seems to be available about the vendor, I cannot find many reviews and they seem a niche player.

Software-wise, I was expecting to use rsync to keep the drives synchronized, although I do understand that can also be very slow, so it would be good to understand other options as well.

Do you have any suggestions for NAS systems with removable had-drives that could be used for this purpose? Any other advice on backing up the freenas mini XL, including what software to use, is also greatly appreciated.
posted by eurandom to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: High-Rely makes NAS units with removable backup trays. You can mount the backup point however you want (iSCSI, shared drive) and once backed up, pull the drive and take off site / put in a firebox.

I used a much older model at a previous job, and it worked well for daily backups of around 100GB. With that much data, I don't know if those units would do what you want, but I wanted to pass along these.
posted by deezil at 5:00 PM on March 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


Well, it's not your approach but just FYI my backup system is based on the fact that I keep my important data on my Linux box which has large hard drives. I use Samba to expose that to my Windows box. Nightly Linux backs itself up using rsync to one of these USB3 4TB external WD portable drives. I have 2 which I periodically switch out to the safe deposit box. Each drive was about $100. For what it's worth.
posted by forthright at 5:17 PM on March 30, 2019


Best answer: We have a Synology NAS configured with a single drive redundancy. So if I lose a single drive I can rebuild the volume and won't lose any data. That's pretty much the first layer of backup - I've had a drive fail w/ no loss of data.

Periodically (once every year or so) I will replace one of the drives. The old drive goes to a remote (in case of fire, etc) as a permanent backup. This is the second layer as I can always take this drive, rebuild the volume and have access to any data that was on the drive at the time I did the replacement. Thankfully, I haven't had to test this option

Rebuilding the volume is pretty simple, so if you want more regular offsite backup, I would imagine you could just keep swapping two drives without too much trouble - it's all automatic, for your size of data I would guess it will take a few hours to swap...

One last thing - for photos, amazon prime allows unlimited photo storage and Synology has an app that does a continuous sync. You may not want to share your photos with amazon, but if you don't have a privacy issue, it's an easy way to get multiple TB of cloud storage...
posted by NoDef at 7:17 PM on March 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


You might find that using a backup NAS that doesn't even attempt to make its hard drives swappable will cut the cost enough that keeping a whole NAS offsite becomes a reasonable option. Western Digital's MyCloud line is some pretty damn cheap network storage.
posted by flabdablet at 9:11 PM on March 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


Hey NoDef— Just to be paranoid on your behalf, because you mentioned the word redundancy rather then mirror, and that tends to mean RAID5/6/SHR. Your method will only work if you only have a total of two drives in your Synology (e.g. the 'single drive redundancy' is just a mirror of the remaining drive, in which case you're just running RAID-1)

(Most times when people talk about single drive redundancy with Synology, they're talking about a scenario where they have 3+ drives and one of those set is allocated for the redundancy. In that case you can recover from a single drive failure, but as soon as you cycle a drive out and a single byte has been written to the array, the drive you've cycled out is worthless from a data recovery point of view.)
posted by Static Vagabond at 9:37 AM on April 1, 2019


@Static Vagabond

Yep - I have 4 drives configured into two SHR volumes - so it is basically two RAID-1 systems in a 4 drive NAS.
posted by NoDef at 4:16 PM on April 4, 2019 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thank you for the feedback. I had found High-rely previously and good to hear that they are reliable solutions.

NoDef inspired me to take a similar approach to what he suggested by using a two-disk Synology NAS with RAID 1 as a backup and occasionally swapping out the hard-drive and storing it offsite. My two NAS's will be in two seperate buildings and both have redudancy (RAID 10 and RAID 1), so there is already quite a few layers of protection against failure. This made me realize I do not have to swap drives nearly as regularly as I originally envisioned. I would hope the Synology is resilient enough to swap drives every six months or so without causing hardware failure.
posted by eurandom at 3:54 PM on April 6, 2019


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