Home NAS Questions

[robd54]

Hi Everyone, I'm looking for advice as to the best way to do the following. Right now I do all my photo and video editing on a desktop (core i7); I want to move to doing this on a laptop. What I'm looking to do is keep all my pictures/videos on this laptop with wireless scheduled backup to a NAS drive. I want these files on the NAS to be viewable from the other laptop so my wife can see everyone even if i'm not home. Then potentially have a 2 way sync on certain folders between my laptop and the NAS. The NAS would also backup the second laptop. I'm not sure if a WHS server or just a NAS with RAID would be the best bet. Also, on this note; for the laptops; is it possible to have a shut laptop (configured to sleep/standy when closed) wake up and backup on a scheduled basis? I know this is pretty vague, appreciate any feedback!

 

[sub mesa]

Looked at FreeNAS? Generally if you need a simple NAS you can build one yourself or buy one; i prefer building them myself ofc since its lowest cost and maximum flexibility.

Laptops can run 24/7 with their lid closed, if you can disable the hibernation/sleep thingy as you close the lid. However, notebook disks can often overheat when running 24/7 in a laptop; even 2W power consumption will destroy the drive; due to heat not able to dissipate but build up to very high temperatures until the notebook HDD starts to fail. This happened to me when i used a not-so-new notebook as 24/7 server.

 

[HappyBison]

It all depends on your knowledge about computer hardware and software.

I agree, FreeNAS is a good choice if you want to build your own NAS server, but you have to know how to build it and how to install FreeNAS on a Flash card, and so on.
FreeNAS has rsync which can do automated backups or you can use some custom software if you want a nice GUI.

If you don't want to deal with it, you can buy ready system (QNap, Thecus, etc), and use Microsoft Backup or similar commercial/free backup software. It's easy, but usually more expensive.

I personally use FreeNAS for storing of my customer's photos. My NAS is set to be RAID with mirroring for increased reliability (most of the commercial NAS system can do RAID too).
I use notebooks for editing and viewing too. All my notebooks are connected via Gigabit network so network speed is not an issue.

 

[digger21]

Hi,

SyncBack can do the backups and syncs for you: http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

Download the free version it's plenty good enough for what you describe.

I've never found wireless to be very good for doing unattended backups. It always seems to go "inactive" and requires a mouse wiggle or keypress to bring the wireless connection back to life. Perhaps it's just my setup.

Any old NAS will do for what you want. You can obviously build your own if you fancy the challenge but TBH it seems a bit OTT for what you've described.