NAS, Time Machine, increased storage - newbie needs to pointed in right direction

[ufgatorvet]

Hello Gurus -

Super-noob (?) question probably, but just need a gentle nudge in the right direction.

I have a 1 Bay Synology drive that I use for TM backups. Been running for years, flawless, no issues.

It has a single 2 TB drive. Well, it's getting full (wife's MBP also backs up to it) and it is pretty slow (got entry level Synology box).

Meanwhile, my 1TB 2017 iMac has run out of space due to tons of videos and photos that I have been gathering on travel.

What I wanted to do was the following:
- Purchase 4 bay box, put in four 4 or 6 TB drives.
- Use bay 1+2 for Raid 1 TM backups
- Use bay 3+4 for network storage for both my iMac overflow stuff and wife's MBP overflow stuff

Does this make sense? There likely is a flaw here somewhere and a better solution to my needs, hence this post.

Thank you for any advice or experience you can offer,

 

[bradl]

Hello Gurus -

Super-noob (?) question probably, but just need a gentle nudge in the right direction.

I have a 1 Bay Synology drive that I use for TM backups. Been running for years, flawless, no issues.

It has a single 2 TB drive. Well, it's getting full (wife's MBP also backs up to it) and it is pretty slow (got entry level Synology box).

Meanwhile, my 1TB 2017 iMac has run out of space due to tons of videos and photos that I have been gathering on travel.

What I wanted to do was the following:
- Purchase 4 bay box, put in four 4 or 6 TB drives.
- Use bay 1+2 for Raid 1 TM backups
- Use bay 3+4 for network storage for both my iMac overflow stuff and wife's MBP overflow stuff

Does this make sense? There likely is a flaw here somewhere and a better solution to my needs, hence this post.

Thank you for any advice or experience you can offer,

This will work, especially if you are sticking with Synology. All you'd need to do is set up the RAID for how you want for each pair of drives. Hard RAID 1 for the TM backups? Make sure that your drives are the exact size. If they aren't, then the RAID will be built according to the smaller of the two drives, leaving you with unused space that you couldn't use for the RAID. After that, set up the other two drives for however you want them to be (for example, SHR, which will give you the flexibility for swapping drives and using the most space).

What is most important is the 1-bay Synology you have. If that 2TB drive is getting full, you should look into using Synology HyperBackup to backup that NAS. As you know, while Synology NASes are definitely resilient, the single drive is your single point-of-failure. Get that backed up as fast as you can. I have the Synology 213j with 2 3TB drives that I'm in the process of migrating off of to the 220+. Right now I'm using it mainly like you are, for storage and TM backups. I'm backing that up to a 5TB external USB drive with HyperBackup. All that should be needed after setting up the 220+ is to restore the data I have from that external USB drive, and I'm back in business. The same needs to be done here for you.

Now, keep in mind that a RAID is not a backup solution. Be sure to have the means to back up the data from that RAID (in this case, the NAS), in case of any failure or disaster. Other than that, your setup will work.

BL.

 

[ufgatorvet]

Great thank you for your quick and very helpful response.

So, the 4 bay box can be configured so that TM only uses the first two bays in a RAID 1 configuration, and the other drives are left alone for me to make available to iMac and the wife's MPB for a network folder (I guess 🤷‍♂️)?

 

[bradl]

Great thank you for your quick and very helpful response.

So, the 4 bay box can be configured so that TM only uses the first two bays in a RAID 1 configuration, and the other drives are left alone for me to make available to iMac and the wife's MPB for a network folder (I guess 🤷‍♂️)?

What you'll be doing is that you can set up multiple RAIDs in the NAS. You set up 2 drives in RAID 1 for your TM backups, and then whatever you'd like to do for the other two drives (RAID 1, RAID 0, SHR, JBOD, etc.). That will give you your two different RAID sets, which would be mutually/physically exclusive of each other. The only way that they would be related is that they are slotted into the same physical chassis.

Once those are created, you'll just need to create the necessary volumes you want on that given RAID set, and you're set to go. If you had a directory called TMBackups on Volume 1 (which is your RAID 1), and a directory called SharedFiles on Volume 2 (which is the other RAID), you'd point Time Machine to the TMBackups directory (mounted on your Mac), back up, the Mac, and it would go to the RAID 1 only). You could connect to SharedFiles and then copy photos to a directory you create there, which would write to Volume 2.

That make sense?

BL.

 

[bob_zz123]

If you don't want to create two volumes then you could do it the way I do it in Synology DSM which is:

Create a shared folder for Time Machine backups
Create a new user (timemachine_user or whatever) with a strong password
Set the quota in the user preferences for the new user (e.g. 1TB)

Then when you do your backups log in as the Time Machine user and TM will show the available disk space as limited to whatever you have the quota set to for the user.

Not sure how this would work if you are adopting existing backups, but I set new backups up for both of my Macs (just one shared folder and one user between the two of them) this way so it didn't consume all the space on my NAS.

If you have a 4-bay NAS doing 2 separate volumes might be better (I only have a 2-bay NAS so it's a bit more difficult to separate this way)

 

[ozaz]

What you'll be doing is that you can set up multiple RAIDs in the NAS. You set up 2 drives in RAID 1 for your TM backups, and then whatever you'd like to do for the other two drives (RAID 1, RAID 0, SHR, JBOD, etc.). That will give you your two different RAID sets, which would be mutually/physically exclusive of each other. The only way that they would be related is that they are slotted into the same physical chassis.

What are the benefits of configuring 2 separate volumes (instead of just configuring all disks into a single volume)?
Is it just for RAID flexibility, so maybe one volume needs disk failure redundancy and the other doesn't?

 

[bradl]

What are the benefits of configuring 2 separate volumes (instead of just configuring all disks into a single volume)?
Is it just for RAID flexibility, so maybe one volume needs disk failure redundancy and the other doesn't?

Think about it this way. If you set up your NAS in a single RAID 0 (striping every drive into one huge volume to maximize space), any bad sector detected on any one of those drives can effectively destroy your entire RAID, with no chance to recover your data. You're putting all of your proverbial eggs into one basket (the RAID 0) but risking chance that the slightest error on one drive will not happen, as it will cause you to lose everything.

Your resiliency will come in with having a RAID setup that will handle the case of a lost drive: RAID 5, two different sets of RAID 1, or RAID 10. It all then will come down to if you want the space or the resiliency, for how serious the data is that will be stored on the NAS. For example, with different sets of RAID 1, if one drive in one RAID 1 (mirroring) set is lost, you can swap out the bad drive for a new one and rebuild the RAID without losing the data from that mirrored set. Additionally, your data on that other RAID 1 will not be affected.

If you used RAID 5 (parity), that would then mean that all of your data would be on one RAID set, as you would lose one drive for the parity, and maximizing the space from the other 3 drives being put together. You could lose one drive and still have an effective RAID, but if a second one is lost, your entire volume, including all of your data, will be gone.

If you used RAID 10 (striping from RAID 1 plus mirroring), again, you'd be in a similar situation as RAID 5, but would still have your data mirrored onto the second set of drives. In a 4-drive chassis, there really wouldn't be much of a difference between using RAID 5 and RAID 10; if you had more than 4 drives to use, then RAID 10 would be the most optimal.

In the case of having a 4-drive Chassis, the redundancy and resiliency of multiple sets of RAID 1 could outweigh the need of all of the space from RAID 0 and putting all of your data into one place with the risk of losing it all from one bad sector.

BL.

 

[ozaz]

Think about it this way. If you set up your NAS in a single RAID 0 (striping every drive into one huge volume to maximize space), any bad sector detected on any one of those drives can effectively destroy your entire RAID, with no chance to recover your data. You're putting all of your proverbial eggs into one basket (the RAID 0) but risking chance that the slightest error on one drive will not happen, as it will cause you to lose everything.

Your resiliency will come in with having a RAID setup that will handle the case of a lost drive: RAID 5, two different sets of RAID 1, or RAID 10. It all then will come down to if you want the space or the resiliency, for how serious the data is that will be stored on the NAS. For example, with different sets of RAID 1, if one drive in one RAID 1 (mirroring) set is lost, you can swap out the bad drive for a new one and rebuild the RAID without losing the data from that mirrored set. Additionally, your data on that other RAID 1 will not be affected.

If you used RAID 5 (parity), that would then mean that all of your data would be on one RAID set, as you would lose one drive for the parity, and maximizing the space from the other 3 drives being put together. You could lose one drive and still have an effective RAID, but if a second one is lost, your entire volume, including all of your data, will be gone.

If you used RAID 10 (striping from RAID 1 plus mirroring), again, you'd be in a similar situation as RAID 5, but would still have your data mirrored onto the second set of drives. In a 4-drive chassis, there really wouldn't be much of a difference between using RAID 5 and RAID 10; if you had more than 4 drives to use, then RAID 10 would be the most optimal.

In the case of having a 4-drive Chassis, the redundancy and resiliency of multiple sets of RAID 1 could outweigh the need of all of the space from RAID 0 and putting all of your data into one place with the risk of losing it all from one bad sector.

BL.

Thanks, although I wasn't really thinking about a scenario where a single RAID 0 volume (no fault tolerance) might be considered. I was more thinking about what benefits are there to organising 4 disks into 2 different RAID volumes where at least one of the volumes provides fault tolerance, versus just having all 4 disks included in a single fault-tolerance-providing-RAID-volume. I suppose the benefit is just to utilise flexibility of options?