NAS with QNAP

[NitromanseR]

Hello everyone,

I would like your help in my "building a NAS" project. In fact, I will use a NAS-ready solution but I have a few questions on how to set things up.

First of all let me explain what I want to do. I live in New Jersey but I grew up in Europe. Currently, I have 3 external hard drives in my hometown in Europe with the same exact backup. Whenever I visit my hometown every few months I update my 3 backup drives. Until then I backup everything on Google Drive/Dropbox. Since I might be moving a lot due to work, for me it is a better solution for my backups to be in my hometown in Europe. However, because this is really inconvenient I though of getting a NAS which will be in my hometown, store all my data there and be able to make changes whenever I want to or retrieve data from anywhere in the world. I know that NAS/RAID is not considered a true backup but I have made my decision and I will go with that.

In order to be safer I would like to ask you the following questions for the NAS I have chosen (QNAP TS-451 with 4x WD Red 4TB drives):

1) Will I be able to set my NAS for a RAID 1 configuration (and not RAID 10). In that way, I will only have 4TB available for use but I will also have three disks "backing up" for more safety (4TB are more than enough for me and I am not considering RAID 10).

2) Will it work to setup the 4 drives in the NAS separately and not in any RAID mode? I will have to backup the same things 4 times but on the other side, if I delete something accidentally from 1 drive, then I still have 3 more copies.

3) Is it worth it to get an additional (smaller) NAS, for example WD My Cloud 4TB, and have my QNAP NAS backing up itself to My Cloud? I will have the My Cloud in New Jersey and the process will go through the internet. That is why it might be really slow and not worth it.

4) If something goes wrong with the QNAP unit and I it breaks down along with up to 3 drives. How can I retrieve the data from the 4th (still working fine) drive? Do I have to buy a QNAP unit again and rebuild?

Thank you very much for your time!

 

[JoeJoe]

You can configure the single drives any way you like, you don't have to do RAID.

What you can do it, is setup two drives in a RAID1 and then the other two drives in RAID1. Giving you 4TB of storage in each RAID1 pair.

You can schedule back ups from one RAID1 pair to the other, or you could make it real time. Up to you, or none at all.

I have two active QNAP NAS devices, I back up from one to the other. I have network recycle bin enabled, so if I delete something I have 30 days (configurable) to get it back.

Since the QNAP runs linux, you can get the data back other ways if the device breaks.