As you can tell, I have finally decided to get serious about my backups. I subscribed to Crashplan as I described in my last post and now I have added a Synology DS413j NAS.
The NAS has 4 bays and a couple USB2 ports. It is not the fastest NAS that Synology makes, but after some long consideration, I decided I could live with its speed. I also considered the 1512+, which is a lot faster, has an extra bay, and even has a port for adding more bays. The reason I decided on the 413j was mainly the price and how I plan to use it.
If you have seen my Mac Attack page, you know that I have been considering a NAS for over a year. The main reason I am just now adding it is because the bang for the buck isn't very high on these things. Consider the 1512+ NAS is $799 and I could buy a Mac Mini for that money. The 413j is quite a bit less at $379 for a diskless NAS. Also, I bought the 413j from BHPhoto with four 3TB drives included (the NAS will accept 4 terabyte drives, but that costs quite a bit more). They offer a significant savings if you bundle them, and it saved around $120 over buying them separate. As a result, the diskless NAS really was around $260 assuming I would buy the discs separately anyway.
While I still thing it is a lot to pay, I have several terabytes of data, several computers, and I have files on multiple external drives that are getting harder and harder to manage as drives fill up. I plan to take this opportunity to delete multiple versions of files and have 3 versions (one on the original drive, one as a bootable backup, and one on the NAS) onsite from now on. As I delete data on current external drives, I will use them with Carbon Copy Cloner (on my Macs, still deciding how to backup Windows) to make bootable copies of my computers. I admit this is probably overkill, but I think it would give me an answer for just about any issue that arises.
Right now, I am still moving data to my NAS and that will probably continue for while considering the speed. However, I am looking forward to using some of the built in Synology apps. I will post a review when I have had more time with it.
Make sure you take a look at my post on the DS Audio app.
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