I pulled it directly from their site so am comfortable with its accuracy.
Too bad since I am always on the lookout for a new NAS .. my setup works bit is growing unwieldy.
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Too bad since I am always on the lookout for a new NAS .. my setup works bit is growing unwieldy.
I use both. At the moment, everything I consider "primary" is stored on TrueNAS, in large part because I got really, really lucky when a relative dumped a perfectly usable computer.
The local backups are a combination of standalone NASes and USB drives connected to Linux boxes.
For offsite, it all goes to Jottacloud via rclone.
I'm not going to try to say that TrueNAS is super easy and intuitive because it 100% is not. But if you've got any kind of background with Linux, even somewhat casual, it's not too horrible. There's a lot there, but those of us just storing files for our own usage at home have very little need to care about the vast majority of it. It doesn't hurt that most of the interaction is via a web interface.
I use it in what I think of as a very vanilla configuration where I have three shares, each of which are mirrored across two drives. I've learned that when one of those drives dies it's very easy to replace it while having no downtime at all, which is a big plus.
I'm even using USB drives for everything, which is commonly said to be a horrifically bad idea. It wouldn't surprise me if that's true but it hasn't affected me, either because A) I'm not doing anything exotic like striping or spanning, just mirroring or B) I've just been exceptionally lucky or C) The computer in question has a solid USB3 implementation. But obviously if you can afford it, SATA would be preferable.
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It’s a shame that drobo had enough problems to drop their products. When I ordered mine, the wait time was long, but I got my HTG discount. I had had a Seagate mirror NAS that had both drives fail at once, and I had spent the better part of a year trying to get that POS up and running. So I was glad to find a unit that would take a variety of drive sizes and numbers and automagically configure itself to accommodate whatever I had available.
I’ve noticed on their site (haven’t needed to visit there for a couple of years) that product availability has been pretty much nonexistent, but lots of hardware manufacturers have “supply chain” problems, so I wasn’t too disturbed by that.
I don’t know what their issues were, but I’ve been a happy customer for about a decade. Too bad they’re gone. It was a very good product. My only beef is that it takes a while for it to wake up after it idles the drives.
I’ve noticed on their site (haven’t needed to visit there for a couple of years) that product availability has been pretty much nonexistent, but lots of hardware manufacturers have “supply chain” problems, so I wasn’t too disturbed by that.
I don’t know what their issues were, but I’ve been a happy customer for about a decade. Too bad they’re gone. It was a very good product. My only beef is that it takes a while for it to wake up after it idles the drives.
I've been using a Synology DS212+ NAS for nearly eleven years. It offers two internal drive slots/bays along with three USB-A ports, one SD card slot and one eSATA port. I store very little data on the internal drives as I prefer to store my media files on three USB connected external drives. I also use a 256GB SD card for miscellaneous data. All-in-all it's a very basic set-up, with no file access to/from the outside world.
However, given my NAS's age I'm aware it might crap-out at any time, so I'm on the hunt for a replacement device. Ideally I'd like a device that offers say, six USB-A (and/or USB-C) ports along with SMB 1 (for connectivity to my OPPO media players) and UPnP/DLNA.
Given more than ten years have passed since my original NAS purchase, has the technology moved on enough that something like a Raspberry Pi or similar type device can be considered?
However, given my NAS's age I'm aware it might crap-out at any time, so I'm on the hunt for a replacement device. Ideally I'd like a device that offers say, six USB-A (and/or USB-C) ports along with SMB 1 (for connectivity to my OPPO media players) and UPnP/DLNA.
Given more than ten years have passed since my original NAS purchase, has the technology moved on enough that something like a Raspberry Pi or similar type device can be considered?
If you can find one these days, a Raspberry Pi will work fine. One of my backup drives is hosted on a Pi 4 with 8 gigs of RAM from the days before the plague dried up the supply. Of course, you'll be limited by USB speed, but for the most part that's only going to matter during your initial transfer. You're unlikely to notice or care about it while streaming.
As for SMB 1, which is generally said to be wildly unsafe, I'm not sure when Oppo added NFS capability to their line, but I can say from personal experience that the 103 and 203 can read an NFS share just fine. I currently have my data shared for read-write via SMB and for read-only via NFS. Allegedly you shouldn't configure both for writing due to differences in file-locking (or so I think I remember it now).
It doesn't really matter what format of storage is used, IMO more important is whether it's backed up. All magnetic media is subject to failures, old platter drives having a significantly higher fail rate than newer SSDs, but they all can/do fail. That's where having a copy somewhere is important if the data matters and/or is unique (only version of the data in existence).
Alarms went off when I read 'saving to usb drives' in your description. Is the data on those drives backed up somehwere like the cloud, the NAS, or another USB drive? If not, and the drive (eventually) fails, the data may not be recoverable or may require an expensive recovery company to retrieve.
My data management process is a large internal drive in my computer (platter style 4TB enterprise class drive), with weekly backup made to an external USB drive. I also recently put this in the cloud for the first time (using Crashplan at $10 /month).
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Has that been a good experience so far? I used them for several years, but between the fact that uploads slowed to a crawl and the fact that the client insisted on First In First Out, it became useless. None of my old stuff was getting backed up because I'd add something new, it would get priority, but everything was so slow that it never got around to copying the older files.
Jottacloud openly admits that they throttle your speed progressively as you store more and more data, but so far I haven't found that to be a problem. Crashplan (again, as of *years* ago, so this may no longer be true) swore that they didn't throttle, but they very obviously did.
There's no need to panic as all my media files are backed up onto other HDD's. All my personal data is stored on USB pen-drives
LTO Tape Drives are the best backup option, but only if you've got a lot of data.
I work in IT professionally and have Crashplan deployed for multiple clients who are budget conscious and just needed their flat files in the cloud. It's imperfect (the client installed on the computer can have random glitches), but overall it's fine for the $10 /month price. I wouldn't want to rely on it for *quick* disaster recovery, but for a handful of files that get deleted before an evening/overnight backup using their standard backup solution to local USB, Crashplan is more than up to the task. For me, on the VERY off chance I ever need it, it's better than nothing. $10 /month is really all I expect from them with regards to the expected value I'll ever need in return.
I've been around long enough to recall supporting these even at the small/medium business level (where I reside professionally), and the tapes and drives that managed them were very buggy and unreliable. "Tape" is a very clunky physical medium and it doesn't take many read/writes to wear them down. A hybrid of USB drives and cloud backup seems to be the sweet spot right now, usb drives are cheap and rather large. Tape is really only justified for datacenter level stuff nowadays. And if not moving the tapes offsite on a schedule, then cloud backup is still necessary for most businesses as part of their redundancy/disaster recovery/business resumption plan.
Tribby2001
400 Club - QQ All-Star
I always thought Magneto-Optical storage would become the data storage shiznit.
Sony MiniDiscs are magneto-optical
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
If SuperDeluxeEdition can turn a profit on 1000 copies like they did with the initial run of Ten Years After on Blu-Ray, it must be feasible on some level so I wouldn't presume to speak for what other companies can and can't do.
In my former life I ran the data department for a large post-production company that had near enough to a petabyte in various types of network storage, and LTO was the standard for on-site data backup for all of it. This was the case for all the facilities across London that we were either working with, or in competition with.
Yes, tape-based storage certainly can be prone to failure (and the LTO machines needed regular service as a result) but the tapes themselves are remarkably robust, both physically and in terms of error-correction and detection. In my 10 years of running nightly LTO backups (through several generations of LTO technology) for all that storage, though sometimes tapes would get stuck in the autoloader of the tape robot, I never had a tape break or jam, and I never had a backup that I wasn't able to restore data from where I wasn't warned of errors during the backup process.
The thing with data storage to remember is (like life) nothing is forever, hence backup strategies like 3-2-1 (three backups across two types of media with one off-site) are useful ways to mitigate the risk. If I needed to archive data for 10 years I'd feel much more safe entrusting it to LTO than a hard drive, (saw dozens, if not hundreds of those drives literally blow a puff of smoke out the back when they reached their EOL), SSD, optical media, or even cloud storage (who knows about the security of your data, the longevity of the provider, and of course bandwidth for large backups becomes an issue).
For people at home though (and members of this forum), tape backup is unrealistic and unnecessary.
I had a couple minidisc players and loved them. [sorta related] I still even have some unused rewriteable cdrw's. Not sure why I've kept them, figure maybe museum pieces someday.
Minidisc was easy to use for recording live shows. Once MP3 players hit the market, the cost/benefit of minidisc vanished and so did the tech.
Depends on how much storage you're running and your level of technical proficiency I'd say. I've got in excess of 60TB between my server and other drives, and I'm never going to upload all of that to cloud storage, even if I could fully saturate my gigabit connection it would take forever. You can get used LTO-4 and LTO-5 drives on eBay for a few hundred bucks, and blank media is inexpensive too.
Cloud storage is great for lots of things, but there's something to be said for having physical posession of your data too - cloud storage providers promise you the world about access, speed and privacy when you're signing up because they want your money, but they constantly shift the goalposts after that to suit their bottom line. Look at Google Drive changing the storage limits recently of enterprise accounts, and before that saying they were going to comb through user folders (using who knows what algorithm) looking for copyright infringing files. You'd hate to rely on something like that in an emergency only to find they've deleted or otherwise restricted access to your data based on some arbitrary corporate policy that came into effect after you signed a storage agreement.
Cloud storage is great for lots of things, but there's something to be said for having physical posession of your data too - cloud storage providers promise you the world about access, speed and privacy when you're signing up because they want your money, but they constantly shift the goalposts after that to suit their bottom line. Look at Google Drive changing the storage limits recently of enterprise accounts, and before that saying they were going to comb through user folders (using who knows what algorithm) looking for copyright infringing files. You'd hate to rely on something like that in an emergency only to find they've deleted or otherwise restricted access to your data based on some arbitrary corporate policy that came into effect after you signed a storage agreement.
Yeah I get all that [as I explained, I work in IT]. What I don't understand is how an average surround music consumer has 60TB of data. You're kinda the exception to the rule.
It's such a shame standard MiniDisc media didn't make it into our computers as a storage device technology. I guess Sony were petrified that people would hack it to copy music, hence the development of their MD Data disc. You've got to love the 90's...
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