Hello

As a more secure way to backup files from my *cough*Windows*cough* computer, I'd like to buy a home NAS as an alternative to having a second drive in the computer, and keep files away from viruses.

Apparently, big brands for that market are Synology, Buffalo, and D-Link.

A few questions:

• Are there other good brands I should know about?
• Do some of them run Linux, so I'm not stuck with proprietary software?
• What backup software would you recommend that has a Windows client? I'm thinking of running rsync.

Thank you.

Seagate, QNAP and Western Digital are some other brands that have decent NAS devices. IMHO anytime something is attached whether it is via a network or physical connection can be vulnerable if your computer is infected so more secure is subjective.

All devices seem to support SMB/CIFS, FTP but some have nfs and also can come with a lot of extra stuff like media server, remote access apps, backup apps, bit torrent client etc. Most run an embedded linux but typically all configuration is done via the web browser. Some can run an ssh server where you can actually login and have access to the actual OS files.

If you just want something for backups and don't care about the other stuff you might want to look a freenas or openmediavault if you have a spare computer lying around or you can even use a Raspberry Pi with an external drive.

They all are running linux on both the arm and atom processors. You won't be able to easily manage it like a normal computer. The images they offer and SDK's are good. Some info online how to hack them. The arm processors in them are kind of weak for transcribing. The smaller single drive models are almost all arm running kind of an older kernel. They do update the OS for them but how secure I can't say. You do get a good footprint on energy for some of these. There may be some somewhat secure way to access them but generally they are pretty much open to simple security. I'd think somewhat virus free but not data protected. They have dnla servers and usually some third party programs that you may find useful. Many people might run plex on them.

They run busybox and little is open about the hardware to compile stuff. Seagate offers a VM SDK to build programs but not to easily manage kernel. You can usually recover from a bad flash with a board mod. Sometimes faulty flash causes backup to start to save.

Getting into them to do stuff is usually possible by ssh. Not terribly secure so use it when needed. Make strong passwords at least.

Not sure about running rsync on them. They all come with some windows/apple program to sync. You may be able to create an iscsi target and then use it to rsync to.

I have an old EX2 WD nas that I use for media in my house. Samba transfer is really slow. Much better to transfer over usb port.


For total control a home made arm with usb may be used. If you just want to buy and go then get a NAS.

If you do not need a NAS server, just a backup machine, I would not use or build a NAS server. Why not drop a cheap 1T drive into a cheap or repurposed desktop machine, load a decent version of Linux, and make it a BURP server. A BURP server can be used for secure and efficient network backup of multiple Windows and Linux machines over the network.

One of the biggest threats today is encryption malware. Any time you have attached storage, including Network attached, anything on that storage is at risk from any connected machine that becomes infected. Generally a backup machine will be at a much lower risk from that threat.

Google for BURP backup: it is low bandwidth, compressing, de-duplicating at the block level backup client-server backup system. I have backed up a 3T (2.3T used) server and had the full backup with five incremental backups take about 512G (YMMV). It allows restore of any file or folder (or all files and folders) to a specific day. What it does NOT do is allow for off-site tapes for DR storage of backups. If you need that, you would have to provide that another way.

Nice analysis. Just one thing I would question, is the use of an old machine. That means noise (fans) and power consumption. The cost of power is going through the roof here. I have a pi3 set aside for this sort of thing - just need to get myself organised ...

If you really want to buy a NAS, the Western Digital NAS are pretty good. I recommend a 2-bay unit in Raid 1. I have used Synology NAS as well and they are decent.

Why a NAS and not a USB connected drive? With a USB drive you plug it in, run your backupo program, unplug the driva and then it's safe from any malware.
It is also possivble to take a USB drive in your car or bag when you go to work, meaning that should something happen to your home you still have that data.

Try out my project if you are into using Raspberry Pi type devices and want a "do it yourself" backup with version control.

http://os-box.com/?page_id=76

I use an Odroid or Raspberry Pi for this. I use BTRFS with nightly snapshots and have it work with Windows previous versions also. It's a personal snapshot backup device I use every day. When I set this up for friends I have them use "previous version" in Windows to get access to all the snapshots on the external drive.

I use FreeFileSync from windows for a daily mirror to a samba share on the Raspberry Pi with an external USB drive using BTRFS. If Pi blows up, I put the external BTRFS drive into another linux machine (or another Pi) and get my files back.

The next part I need to add to it is BTRFS maintenance, but so far after 5 months I haven't had a single issue.

Please reply to the suggestions there if you find any issues or have a better way to do something. I'm not an expert and always good to learn better ways.

By "old machine" I did not mean ancient hardware. A reasonable misunderstanding, since I have used the words with that meaning in other posts.

I just mean a machine that you have retired, or can retire, from another use ( a no longer used but otherwise good Windows-7 home edition that cannot be upgraded to Win10 due to incompatible hardware, as one example) and reuse it for this purpose.

Thanks much for the infos, including about Burp.

The backup plan does include uploading a password-protected ZIP of the most important files to the Net, in addition to backing up files locally (several GB worth I could live without, but are nice to keep.)

I do have old hardware I could use; The reasons I was thinking of a SOHO SAS instead are 1) the small form factor, 2) the very small power it uses, and 3) the silence.

Which is why I was curious to know if any SOHO NAS was either already running Linux, or could be hacked to run Linux so that I wouldn't be stuck with a proprietary OS.