I guess my question is what's the difference between NAS and a direct connect box ... to me it's simply the method of connection and that's it. The NAS itself still has to be configured and by nature doesn't really offer any more security than direct connect devices other than it could be in a different location. Its still a raid 5, 6 or 10 device of some type, just like a direct connect raid would be and all of those issues remain. Yes perhaps better made than many and with some nice utilities, but it's still just a raid that's connected to a network instead of directly to a computer.
You don't know what the differences are, but you assume they are insignificant - but they aren't. There are a lot of different types of boxes which offer different types of features. These features are not trinkets, they are crucial to perserve your data alive. You can take a Synology box and direct connect it and it still has most of its advantages.
These advatages include:
- Good quality heatsink that keeps active drives at 34c
- Software to monitor drive temperature
- Redundant fans
- Software to monitor the fans
- Software to monitor the entire system and alert you via email about any problem
- Software to periodically check each drive fix and notify autromatically
- Different ready to use backup plans
- Different ready to use remote access plans
- Control all access types to avoid abuse
And there are dozens more features that exist in an excellent data OS such as Synology in a way that is stable and very easy to use. These features along with the robust build make the difference between different boxes.
the challenge with any backup solution is maintaining the reliability of the backup and having enough redundancy to not fail in a catastrophic situation. This usually means a series of backups all on systems that are designed to be as reliable as possible, knowing that at some point in time some will fail and can be rebuilt before others fail.
In general yes, but a properly constructed main system will have very little chance of disaster. You do need 2-3 boxes each containing your entire data. If the main box is RAID 10 with enterprise drives, then a main total failure is extremely unlikely. Talk to me in a few years and I can give you more concrete data on how much enterprise drives fail in a proper enclosure. You do realize that a regular drive in a regular enclosure will have totally different statistics.
To me Raid 10 really doesn't offer much more than cloning 2 raid 0's other than it's automatic and instant so failure means 0 downtime. It does have risks in that writing something mistakenly to the drive will get immediately copied to the mirror backup, where as a nightly clone process which archives changed or deleted files offers a way to get something back ... maybe not that important but perhaps occasionally useful. Of course the trade off there is failure of the main raid before the daily backup could mean loss of data. One thought is a raid 10 that is cloned nightly to another raid would be something to consider ... offering advantages of each method.
You are looking at it wrong. RAID 10 is not comparable to two RAID 5 - it is comparable to one RAID 5. You still must have two enclosures at least. RAID 10 is the safest configuration from the small ones - RAID 50 or 60 are safer but these are not applicable to you. RAID 10 is safer, because when you rebuild you rebuild from one drive only. In RAID 5 or 6 when you rebuild, then you "resilver" the entire NAS. Meaning that every bit in the NAS gets read and written. This creates very heavy stress on the drives and often generates new problems and the famous double failure which loses you all your data. This does not happen with RAID 10 which rebuilds one drive from one drive - and not taking six days to do it. Again RAID 10 serves as one box - if you consider it as having two copies of your data, then your math is wrong. It's one copy with really good safety. You still need the second independent copy and there you can skimp on the cost and use RAID 5 or 6.
Any reliable backup strategy is more about how data is stored redundantly and how the hardware is monitored and maintained because the data will need to be rewritten to new devices (hard drives etc) over time. This really does mean more than one redundant copy.
Yes.
In some circumstances a well maintained and properly backed up NAS by a sysadmin is a great option and great solution
You don't need a sysadmin for that. You can do everything yourself. Follow my instructions here, invest a few thousand dollars and a couple of weeks of your time, and you're 99.99% protected. Just don't skip on some parts that you think are not important. The Synology system does the system administration for you. You just need to set it up once, and once a week look in on it to see all is well. It will let you know anyway when anything is amiss. That is hugely different from a Windows server which does require you to perform the sysadmin tasks. The Synology automatic administraion may not be sufficient for an actual enterprise, but it is very sufficient for SOHO.
but in a single user environment I just can't see it adds any value.
The value depends on how important your data is to you - how much is it worth to you that it is not lost. Differently from a camera, insurance money can't rebuild your data. Your camera system costs $50k - is it really so much to create a data preservation system that costs $8k but gives you real protection? It makes sense to me.
I have a synology and a Drobo NAS at my store, I do it for collaboration and the need to share image files with various output devices, but oddly the 7 year old windows server I was trying to replace when I purchased those two devices is still a more reliable file sharing device than either NAS which seem to have trouble showing up for users or seem to randomly drop from the network - one issue is I'm still struggling with a network that must keep XP, 7, 8 and OS X all sharing files ( i probably still have a vista box running somehwere too).. No solution so far other than keeping that aging windows server running for files that absolutely must be available to any machine on the entire network.
You present it as if having Synology means that you will have low stability. That is not really the case. How did you implement your Synology and your Drobo? Are they RAID 5? Are they Red or Enterpise drives? Are they on UPS with comms for each one? Why you are having trouble seeing the Synology - I do not know. I have zero problems accessing mine from different systems, not all Windows. If it is configured correctly, your NAS should have no problem appearing on your network 100% of the time. If you are using Macs, then this could be the problem - I don't know what goes on in the Apple universe, but I know they don't encourage connectivity to machines that were not sold by them.