I’m new to the world of NAS and am considering using a QNAP to store photos, documents, and backups from various computers.
I’ve read that a RAID helps keep data available if a drive fails, but that it doesn’t replace a backup. What strategy would you recommend for a home user? I was thinking of keeping one copy on the NAS, another on a disconnected USB drive, and a third off-site or in the cloud.
I’d also like to know which security measures you consider essential: snapshots, two-factor authentication, disabling UPnP, or avoiding exposing the NAS directly to the Internet.
I’d appreciate any advice or experiences with a similar setup. Best regards!
I would avoid two factor, if the NAS date goes out of sync you will have issues with the authenticatior app.
Never exposing the NAS via upnp or manual port forwards is the right thing to do, yes.
The backup procedure (local and cloud copy) are good, just make sure you actually do backups regularly (if the USB drive is air-gaped)
I would recommend multiple backups in multiple ways for multiple reasons. Here is what I do:
1.) Backup my all files from my main NAS to my backup NAS (only works if you have two NAS units of course).
2.) Backup all files to iDrive, three times a week.
3.) Backup my TimeMachine backups (from my Macs) to a USB hard drive weekly.
4.) Create daily snapshots and replicate them on my second NAS.
5.) Backup cricital data to MyQNAPCloud online storage account daily.
Lots of redundancy here as I don’t trust any one method to not fail at some point! The snapshots are there mainly so I can do file level recovery if I accidentally delete a file in the middle of the day or something. It’s not so much a “backup” but a protection.
Multiple copies stored in multiple places - that’s what you really want.