OT ish entry level NAS...

Remember one copy does not make a good backup solution.

The difference in price between, say, a Western Digital My Cloud, which has a decent NAS spec for home use and reasonable quality disk you could plug into your router, really isn't that much. You can get My Cloud's with an ethernet port or a USB port, I'd recommend the former. Stick it on your network- everyone in the house can use it (if you want). You can even set up so you can access files remotely if you want, not to mention a media server.

I used one until recently- I still have it, it is to become the media serve in our second home, I've upgraded to a larger, RAIDed system.

Jim K formulated on Wednesday :

Some of the best NASs around are made by Synology.

Get two 1TB (or bigger) Western Digital Red drives, slap them in a Synology enclosure and set them up as a Synology Hybrid Raid and be safe in the knowledge that if one drive fails, just unplug it, put a new one in and the Synology unit will rebuild the volume from the remaining good one.

Very easy to set up and use, I wouldn't use anything else now. And of course, the beauty of any NAS is that you can access it from anywhere in the world. Play your own music and/or video collection, access copies of travel documents, insurance etc., etc.

Or a NAS with multiple copies if in the same house as the PC's it's backing up that has just burnt down...

For the applications you describe one of the 2 bay Netgear ReadyNAS devices would probably suit you well.

If you want to go posher, then look at Synology and QNAP...

(Not been at all impressed with the Buffalo linkstations I have seen)

Most solutions like that tend to provide fairly "austere" NAS. You would be better off with a dedicated box IMO.

Things like being able to manage snapshots of files (so you can revert to older overwritten/deleted versions), the ability to replicate to another NAS, and the ability to run things like media servers directly on the NAS extend the capabilities well beyond what most of the routers I have seen will do (and that includes the higher end Draytek devices I use).

While mirrored drives in the box will save you from total data loss due to a single drive failure, keep in mind that a single box in the same building as the lappies etc will still be vulnerable to fire and theft etc. So backup to the cloud or another off site NAS is worth having.

Modern NASs should be able to run encrypted partitions[1], so if someone pilfers the whole box, at least they can't see your data.

It all depends on why you are backing up.

One copy on the same machine protects you fromt the most common form of data loss -a defective disk.

Another copy in te same house barely improves matters.

And the most common form of data loss is user error - often not discovered immediately, before it has been replicated.

In message <DZmdnddBa snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk>, Jim K snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

I have the same router and tried using a usb drive in it.

I can't remember exactly why, but I abandoned it as a solution. I seem to remember that it was slow and it was certainly inflexible.

I now use a couple of old PC's running different Linux versions, but need to increase the size of the storage, as I'm rapidly outgrowing 2TB.

Is there any reason to think about a dedicated NAS box rather than a PC for network storage?

Well, you will have to leave the PC on all the time.

The question is whether a dedicated PC is the solution, I guess.

That's what I have - HP microserver with four disks in it. The power used by the disks swamps that used by the rest of the box.

Fire, flood, etc. taking out the PCs and the backup.

I have two cheap(ish) synology NAS boxes.

One gets the backups from the PCs using file history and images.

The other gets a daily backup of the first NAS and keeps versions of it for 180+ days.

They are located in different buildings.

Then just because I can I run a backup of the files on the first NAS to a cloud provider. Amazon were doing a years office for £50 and you can run that on five PCs and get 5 terrabytes of storage which is pretty cheap for that much storage.

While its tempting to repurpose an old PC, one of the main advantages (other than their small size) will be power consumption; dedicated NAS boxen will often come in at under 20 - 30W when active. Some of the micro server solutions may come close, but that's going to cast as much or more if you have to actually buy one for the purpose.

a friend near me had a lightening strike. It hit the cable box in the strteet took out 5 or so telephone links the HDMI lead from the DVD player to the TV welded it;s self to the DVD player.

The iMac was OK apart from bluetooth is no longer found. The virgin router died as did the settop box. The aerial lead was blown apart at the conector as it was found 5 ft way. The 5 amp fuse must have mostly vapourised as all that was left was the metal caps and some dust.

A couple of boards in a samsugn TV needed replacing.

(And a sign of the times - a house nearby was burgled last week. The villain(s) went straight upstairs looking for jewellery, which they found, and didn't touch any of the electronic equipment.)

Back in the '90s, the company I worked for kept on and off-site, rotated backups. They also backed up the most critical data to keep the company functioning direct to their computer systems at other sites ... on three continents!

SteveW

I don't either.

Can anyone point me to a/some reasonably specced & priced options for a basic NAS device?

Can it be as simple as a couple of TB on a portable hard drive plugged into the usb port of my router? Or would I be limiting /hindering other "good things" that way?

Initially I'm just thinking to create a safe place to store our files etc so in the event of tealeafery we just need new lappys, tablets etc & could pretty much be back up & running without all the heartache & worry of stolen drives full of data...

TIA

Mmm it's a Plusnet hub one currently, so has a 1gbps ethernet port, but not sure USB port spec.. "unlikely" is my initial assessment :-)

USB3 will do 5 Gbps and USB3.1 10 Gbps. Also most routers don't support much in the way of user control.

Noted ta.