OK so its not a grand as the subject makes out. However i am looking to put a NAS drive at the end of the garden in a very small nas sized building, so i can do off site backups. The electric and networking is not an issue.
I am wondering how to cope with heat,cold and physical security
The reason i am not using cloud is
Any one ever tried this
Chris.
There is no such thing as total security. You can put bars on the window or have no window. You can have it brick built and insulated during construction. You can have a secure door. Don't forget to make the roof secure (often overlooked) You can have cctv. But you are only buying time. Such a secure structure attracts attention as holding something valuable.
For heating/cooling I would have a small fan heater and extract fan.
Thanks Harry, but i was thinking NAS sized, and hidden behind a bush. I could just use bricks with a secure roof (or lid/door), but i'm worried about heat and cold, so i was looking for passive options, i.e not heating or AC. Insulation should deal with host of the cold issues, but what about heat in the summer , will air vents be sufficient
Err yes, but the NAS isn't at the bottom of the Garden. It's an 8TB device, four drives, and it's the size of a toaster and silent so it sits in a spare bedroom and doesn't disturb guests.
A "nas sized building" would be smaller than a dog kennel. The NAS is 135W so heat isn't exactly a problem either.
The OP did write "very small nas sized building".
Given one randomly select small 4TB NAS runs out at 20.4 x 8.6 x 12.7 cm, I get the impression your suggestions are a little OTT.
I see the most difficult issues as being cooling and humidity.
Steve, Its the heat build up from the disk (single) that i'm most concerned about
On Monday 01 April 2013 09:25 Chris Crinkle wrote in uk.d-i-y:
Couple of options: small brick enclosure , say 2 ft cube with a slab on top. Biggest problem will be protecting from ingress of hose spray. Grow some plants over it and it will look like some cover over a drain or valve or something.
Or, more railway-esq - a metal or plastic water resistant enclosure - say a meter box, on a pole or a wall. Again, wall mounted it might be mistaken for am actual meter box or a box that contains some garden electrics.
Cold is not a problem and neither is damp - the NAS will have enough internal heat to say dry.
Hot is, in summer, so if it can go somewhere shaded, it will probably be OK without box ventilation (lose heat through the walls).
Not much of an offsite backup, then. The great thing about DR planning is that you can quite legitimately be a real doom'n'gloom monger... Fire, pestilence, plague.
Mind you, I can think of a stack of physical circumstances where having it at the end of the garden wouldn't be much of an offsite, either. Flooding, for a start.
Yes, seeding to the cloud takes a hell of a long while. BUT - once it's there, it's there. After that, it's just deltas that go up.
The real pikey offsite backup solution is just to have a pair of identical USB drives, NASs, whatever - and swap 'em over every once in a while, leaving the "offsite" one round at a mate's house.
Chris Crinkle :
I've used a garden NAS for backup for many years. It's been, at various times, in the garage, in the stable, and in the greenhouse.
I didn't take any great notice of environmental matters when choosing the NAS, and selected a Buffalo LinkStation. I did have one that failed on me. The replacement was better than the original because it had a physical on/off switch and didn't need individual attention every time the power was interrupted (which was quite often, for irrelevant reasons).
The NAS and its Homeplug connector live inside an old cardboard box right next to the power point, making them inconspicuous to visitors.
I haven't bothered at all about physical security, which was already taken care of for the garage anyway. If the drive were to be stolen, I'd find out immediately (backup failure), and I'd simply replace it, no big deal. *But* the documents on the drive are contained in TrueCrypt volume, so there would be no data security implications. By far the majority of the data on the drive is media files, which are not sensitive and therefore unencrypted.
HTH
I have three main concerns about cloud storage: it not being there anymore; it being under a competitor's control; it being under the whim of whichever government controls the hosting site.
Google, without the brackets, (site:theregister.co.uk "goes titsup") and surprise yourself how many of these business failures were cloud hosts that gave their clients no warning of impending disaster. Google itself has a track record of dropping services when it feels like it because it has become bored. And it may be within the margins of statistical probability but there are a steady trickle of new, innovative companies who use $bigonlinecompany as a cloud host who have complained that their new, innovative product/service was stifled at birth because $bigonlinecompany brought out the same new, innovative thing a week before their launch date.
Nick
Talk about OTT. My two 2T NAS drives are just bigger than a 3.5" drive and take about 6W each. The gigabit switch is nearly as big and probably uses as much power.
You could fit them in those plastic boxes they sell to put 4 way extensions in but mine live in the shed.
They aren't expensive but you may want to encrypt the disks to protect the data if one is stolen.
BTW how does yours count as off site, is it in a different building?
Adrian :
That's not far off what I do. Except that I have three, not two, and the latest lives in my car, or (when I'm away) in my suitcase.
yes, in that I have a local 'cloud server' I built myself No, in that its not down the garden.
Heat? no worries. use a low powered machine - mines based on an atom - more than fast enough and able to cope with up to 30C ambient.
Cold. It will keep itself warm enough - just keep the rain off and ventilation good.
Physical security? put it somewhere no one thinks of looking and screw it down. Spray it lurid colors and stencil your name and postcode on it. Not worth nicking then. The tea leafs who do garden sheds want easily saleable shit that is anonymous.
It wont be worth a lot anyway.
well don't. They wont run hardly at all. Unless they need to. My twin
500GB system runs at about 5-10W. Eniugh to stay warm, but it never gets hot.
You could take the RAID approach. Don't spend lots on a fancy enclosure, have two enclosures (passive-cooled system, seal up so it's watertight, expose a surface to air or water). Put them in different places. If one goes down, the other is still there.
Biggest risk is correlation: you get a flood and both are washed away, heatwave, electric spike, something like that. If you can manage it, diversity is your friend here.
Theo
Seems to me that if your drive were stolen you'd no longer need a garage!
Heat and cold ought not be a problem if you insulate it a little. They tend to be fairly power efficient, and so should not get too hot. While at the same time will provide some heat to keep the thing from getting too cold.
On the security front there are a few things to consider... obviously backups to it can be encrypted. Media and other less sensitive stuff probably does not matter. However also give some consideration to how you network it, in as much as exporting a high bandwidth connection to your lan to somewhere inherently more accessible than your house needs to be done with some care!
I have a home server sat in a cupboard (multiple disks, triple core processor, etc.) I fitted vents on the side of the cupboard (top and bottom) and the top vent has thermostatically controlled fan fitted. I would have thought that a NAS in a box, raised a few inches, with vents and a fan on the bottom would work, Fan grille and filter would prevent rodents and insects from getting in, direction would prevent rain or spray.
I would presume that the NAS is similar to a PC in that if the vent fan were to fail and the temperature rose too high, it would shut down?
SteveW
Plant a telgraph pole; attach your NAS enclosure loosely with a pair of rings; fit floats and long cables - you'd need a hell of a flood before it reached the top of the pole! :)
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