NAS device

[glorybound]

My cloud backup has become too expensive, and my ISP has threatened to throttle me if I don't slow down the data, so I am seeking an excellent NAS solution. I disconnected my cloud backup and locally to three devices. All in I have 6TB of data. I have a 4TB NAS running now (it doesn't back up any of the 6TB of data), and that mirrors all of my active projects. My 4TB NAS isn't expandable. Any suggestions?

[glorybound]

UPDATE - My NAS is upgradable. This is what I have;

My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB (2x4TB) 2-Bay Personal Cloud Storage Server

• Store up to 72TB of data

[dlparisi]

UPDATE - My NAS is upgradable. This is what I have;

My Cloud EX2 Ultra 8TB (2x4TB) 2-Bay Personal Cloud Storage Server

• Store up to 72TB of data

Just swap out the drives then but you'll have to figure out how to not lose data during the transfer.

I'm not sure exactly how much data you need to backup (is it 6tb, 4tb, or something else) but if you've got an extra/old machine lying around I can also recommend building your own NAS using Unraid (https://unraid.net/). I used to backup to an old 4-bay drobo which eventually died on me and was being a bit of dog anyways so switched to Unraid and am currently running 12tb of storage with a 6tb parity drive for data protection/recovery (which your current solution doesn't offer unless you're using disk mirroring). What happens if a drive fails in your current setup? Unraid is not difficult to set up IMO but has a bit of a learning curve compared to windows, the unraid forums are usually a big help if you run into hurdles. If I start to run out of space (I'm currently at around 8TB) I can just add another drive to the array (it doesn't need to match the others). Read speed is not great but is fine using a small (256GB) SSD as a cache drive and it's only backup anyways so it doesn't need to be that fast for me. There are other options too, Proxmox comes to mind although I don't have any experience with it.

As for your ISP, are you sending compressed backup files over the internet or just mirroring the local files? I would think that compressed backup files would be relatively small compared to mirroring the actual files. I run Retrospect as a nightly backup and then Unraid clones all of this (changes only) to an internet connected remote hard drive (it's at a relative's house). The remote hard drive is mounted on a raspberry pi Zero connected over a tailscale VPN. The only thing I hd to ensure for the remote drive was that I did the initial copy locally since there was no conceivable way to transfer the TB's of data from many years of backup. Once that was done though the nightly backups are usually just a few GB's.


Edit: It's maybe not ideal since you'll have to figure out how to not lose data, but you could even harvest the two 4TB drives from your current backup to add to the Unraid array (remember the drives don't need to match each other, just the parity drive needs to be the largest.)