[SOLVED] NAS or external HDD/SSD?

[Iraqvet05]

I have two PCs on my home network, each with 3 HDDs. I have a ton of pictures from my amateur sports photography hobby and family photos on both PCs and need to think about backing them up. I have a Linksys router with a USB storage port I could use but trying to find the easiest and cost effective way to back up both PCs. Should I partition a large external HDD then used the USB port on the router or would the more extensive NAS be the solution?

 

[velocityg4]

Depends on how much data we're talking about. Three HDD each doesn't say much as they can be any size.

 

[digitalgriffin]

I have two PCs on my home network, each with 3 HDDs. I have a ton of pictures from my amateur sports photography hobby and family photos on both PCs and need to think about backing them up. I have a Linksys router with a USB storage port I could use but trying to find the easiest and cost effective way to back up both PCs. Should I partition a large external HDD then used the USB port on the router or would the more extensive NAS be the solution?

You could add an external HDD to the router, then use windows backup with infinite copies. Make sure your router password is different from your windows one. I will warn you those external HDD drives can be a bit flakey with router firmware and have a tendency to overheat and crash and burn. They do offer external SSD cages now, which will allow you to go up to 2TB for $200 + cage ($40). While not huge, that should store a good size of your collection without the worry of overheating those external HDD enclosures have.

Do NOT mount it with a drive letter. This is to avoid ransomware which will overwrite the drive in question. Once you mount it as a drive letter, windows stores the credentials to write so any program can access it. However if you mount an external drive via UNC and provide a password/user id that is unique, only windows backup will have an encrypted copy of that password, making hijacking the drive difficult.

A portable local drive runs the risk of ransomware. I don't consider it a safe backup unless there is some sort of gated security (ie: User name/password) associated with the backup folder that is unique to the folder. The best way to do this is create a unique account like "Backup" that has low level privileges. Then create a folder on the external drive that has permissions only for that low level account to write. When trying to access the drive folder for backup, windows should ask you for the password for that folder.

 

[Iraqvet05]

Depends on how much data we're talking about. Three HDD each doesn't say much as they can be any size.

I just looked at the PC I built a year ago and realized I went overboard with the storage on it. 4 drives
- 500 GB SSD boot, 3/4 used
- 2 TB HDD, mostly empty
- 75 GB HDD (mostly full) pulled from an old PC
-500 GB M.2 with virtually nothing on it.
I need to consolidate and get rid of a drive or 2.

 

[USAFRet]

I just looked at the PC I built a year ago and realized I went overboard with the storage on it. 4 drives
- 500 GB SSD boot, 3/4 used

• 2 TB HDD, mostly empty
• 75 GB HDD (mostly full) pulled from an old PC

-500 GB M.2 with virtually nothing on it.
I need to consolidate and get rid of a drive or 2.

Overboard?
That's just getting started.