QNAP TS-119P+ and LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra

[shanep]

Hi All, another SOHO storage newbie looking to benefit from your collective experience.

My wife and I have a Mac (OS X 10.5.8) and a laptop (Win7 Home Premium 64bit). What we would like to do is:

• Combine our iTunes libraries and store them centrally so that we can both access them.
• Store all our photos and videos centrally (i.e. not via shared directories on either of the machines).
• Store all the usual MS Office Mac Pages/Numbers documents locally but back them up to a shared device that can be read/written to by either OS X or Win7, and removed from the house (to insure against fire damage / burglary etc).
• Backup both the central iTunes library and the central photo/video store to an external device that can be removed from the house (portability would be nice). Ideally a 'one touch' backup solution over eSata would be good. Becuase we'd be backing up the entire NAS to another device a single disk or two disks with RAID0 is fine in both the NAS and the backup device.
• Some form of access control compatible with both OS X and Win7 user accounts.
• Estimated storage requirements are 1TB but it would be nice if the solution could provide 2TB for future proofing.
• Max individual file size likely to be no more than around 2-3GB (video files).
• Would be nice if the NAS portion of the solution was aesthetically pleasing as it will sit on display on our lounge (cabled to the router which is located in the lounge). Because of its location it should be pretty quiet in either an idle state or when the disk is spun up.
• Would also be nice if it didn't cost a fortune, but price is the least important criteria.

After quite a bit of research I think I've found a workable solution:

• QNAP TS-119P+ for central storage of all photos/videos and its iTunes server. We could also backup the locally stored Office/Mac documents to it.
• LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra. Use QNAP's one touch button to backup entire disk to the LaCie over eSata.

Backing up the locally stored Office/Mac documents first to the NAS and then to the external device might be a bit of backup overkill but they are such a small percentage of the total storage requirements I'm not really fussed about that. What is critical is that the external device is accesible from both OS X and Win7.

Can anyone spot any issues / incompatibilities etc? Or is there a better solution out there?

Also - does anyone know if the QNAP comes bundled with any software for both OS X and Win7 64bit that we could use to backup the locally stored files to the QNAP?

Cheers
Shane

 

[thiggins]

Are you really going to take the backup drive off site? That requires good discipline.

Your selections are fine. You can use any eSATA drive.

QNAP bundled backup software is Windows only and pretty basic.