Hello all, I'm new here...

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As I said in the title, I’m new not just to this community, but to home NAS systems as well. I’m still trying to figure out which one to buy as my first NAS and I have so many questions.

Right now the two Qnap NAS systems I’m considering are:

  1. TS-264 because of the price

  2. TS-464 because it seems to be a good balance between storage space, price and number of drives it can hold.

Both can be upgraded to the QuTS Hero OS, which I want for the ZFS protection against bitrot.

My main question is this: there is so much to consider in not just the hardware, but also setting up ZFS and raid and how many people are using the system, my ADHD is on overload! And yes, I really DO live with ADHD!

I need help figuring out how to setup a new NAS, given that this first system I’m going to focus on using it as a backup and storage for all my data. I know these can be used for things like plex and other stuff. For now, I need to try and keep this first NAS simple, and I’ve decided to focus on data backup.

Here are some details, there will be two users. Myself and a family member. We both have our own laptops and phones, so I’d like to be able to keep our data separate for the purpose or organization. No, I’m not trying to block access to my data, I’m just trying to keep it organized if possible. I also have data stored in a cloud service, I want to add it to this NAS system. Last but not least, I want to keep a clone of both laptops. I don’t know if it’s possible to do the same for an android phone.

Can anyone tell me if it is possible to keep a clone of my android phone in the same manor as cloning my laptop?

To sum this up: is there an easy guide or can someone tell me how I can setup a new Qnap NAS, with QuTS Hero OS installed, so I’m using ZFS to protect against bitrot and raid to protect against a drive failure?

Please try to keep it simple, remember, I have ADHD and I have trouble learning complex systems for the first time.

Thank you for any help provided!

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Welcome! Let me give you my thoughts on this.

Get as high powered a NAS as you can. The one you are considering may have a nice price point, but it only has a Celeron processor. It is not that great in speed and what it does. If you are ONLY going to do file serving, it might be OK. But you want to use Plex and you’ll probably find other apps you want to use as well. Plus doing things like backups, PC syncs, etc. all take resources.

I’ve had a TS-451 for several years. It is way underpowered (and I only use it now for my security cameras). Almost a year ago I purchased a TS-873A. Much more powerful, but I wish I would have spent another $700 to $1000 and bought a more powerful unit. I don’t know your economic/financial situation, but buy as big/powerful a NAS as you can afford. You are effectively buying a server. You don’t want your server being less powerful than the machines connecting to it - right?

Also, get as much memory as you can afford as well. At least 32GB. I have 64G in my TS-873A and 32G in my TVS-672XT (which I found used on eBay as a great deal). QNAP says you have to buy their memory. Balderdash. It will cost you as much as a NAS from them! Brand name memory of the proper speed/type will work fine.

Since you want to run QuTS Hero, you will DEFINITELY want a more powerful NAS and lots of memory. I would not run Hero on a Celeron system. Not no way. Not no how. ZFS does inline data deduplication and compression on the fly - so again more CPU usage. Also, the way space is allocated and shares are created may surprise you a bit - a shared folder is treated like its own drive. This is very different from the QTS OS. ZFS has some good advantages to it like WORM. But it has some weird quirks where you can get unrecoverable file system errors. I just went through this. My NAS seemed fine but a QNAP tech showed me the issue and it could have gotten serious. I had to basically wipe the thing and start over. No idea how these errors happened - but they did. But I have Hero on both my larger NAS units and I generally like it.

OK, now on to some of your questions. You can set up different user accounts where those accounts will have dedicated access to their “home” folder that is just theirs. You can set up privileges of what folders users can access, what apps they can access, etc. So you can have that segregation easily.

You can mount your cloud service as a volume on your NAS. There are two ways to do it using an app called HybridMount. First is just as a remote cloud mount. That mounts the cloud drive as a volume the NAS can access. However, it does not share that volume with your network (ie: You won’t see it on your PC/Mac as a shared folder you can access). You can access it from File Station in the NAS web interface.

The second method is called FileCloudGateway. In this method, you create a shared volume on the NAS for the cloud data and it synchronizes it to the NAS and vice versa. It basically caches frequently used data locally so you have access to it faster. When it works, it’s pretty cool. I had major problems getting it to mount a WebDAV volume on my web server and gave up. But I’ve also used it for DropBox, etc. This method DOES share the cloud service as a shared folder that other machines can easily access. You get two free licenses for File Cloud Gateway. If you have more than two cloud services, you have to buy an additional license for each service.

Can you “clone” your Android phone? I wouldn’t say clone, but you can use a mobile app called Qfile to sync photo albums, music, documents, etc. It works pretty well. And QNAP has relay services you can connect to when you are away from home so you can always access the files on your NAS wherever you are (best way and fastest is to set up a VPN to your home network but QNAP’s service is not bad).

As far as cloning your laptops, there’s a number of backup programs available. I’m a Mac guy and use TimeMachine backups from my Macs to the NAS units. I also use Qsync to synchronize important files that I want to access from every machine. If you are a PC person, there are a number of PC backup apps that work with the NAS.

There’s a lot of info for you! :smiley: Please reach out if you have more questions or want to learn more.

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Actually, I can’t afford the $1,000 NAS systems right now. The ones I listed are within my price range.

I’ve heard these can run slow, that’s why I’m going to use this as just data backup.

I plan to buy a faster, system in a year or two so I can use it for all the apps and things you mentioned.

Sounds like the hero OS is out. How do I protect my data from Bitrot?

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Maybe, maybe not. And, if you have a support issue, the first thing they will do is get you to put the supported RAM back in.

For straight file backup, the O/S probably isn’t that important, the only factor is really if you want ZFS or not. Most (many) people don’t care.

How do you protect against bitrot? Simple, backups.

You need to decide how and where you are going to store your data (single drive, raid1, raid5 etc) depending on what type of data and how important it is to YOU.

You also need to decide what backup strategy is right for YOU. (Raid is not a backup).

F0r straight data backup, you need a minimal system, unless you are constantly backing up large amounts of data. I run numerous 15 year old NAS boxes that are REALLY OLD AND SLOW, but work as simple file storage and cover for hardware failure, disk failure, offline storage and data duplication. It all fits into a backup STRATEGY (not a single backup option). Some data is just a copy, some gets copied to the cloud etc etc.

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That’s perfectly fine. As I said, get as powerful as NAS as you can. If you can’t afford more than what you’ve stated, then no worries. It should be fine for doing file backup.

QTS is fine for storing data. Just be sure you have a backup of the data on the NAS. Multiple backups to multiple places.

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Of course they will. They claimed that memory was my problem on multiple occasions. Then I did a memory test that passed with flying colors. They don’t ask me that any longer.

QNAP doesn’t manufacture memory. In fact, my TS-873A came with a Kingston DIMM. There is nothing magical about memory as long as you use quality memory and the type the the CPU manufacturer specifies. There’s nothing special about the QNAP motherboards or BIOS either. But people fall for QNAP’s message of having to use “their” memory and they make very high profit margins on it. That’s fine if that’s what you want to spend your money on.

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Thanks for the information. Obviously, I need to do a lot more research before I make a purchase.

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Is it possible to install ZFS on its own though? How difficult is ZFS to get up and running?

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What do you mean, ‘on it’s own’ ?

You install QTS, you get ext4 partitions, you install QuTS, you get ZFS data partitions

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No.

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Users experiencing similar issues can also refer to this FAQ:

Beginner’s Guide - How do I get started with my QNAP NAS? | QNAP