NAS to NAS Synchronization for PLEX Media

General Discussions
1

I’m learning more each day about NAS and PLEX, mostly from this forum. After learning that RAID 0 (mirroring) is not a true backup, I decided to pursue two single-bay NAS drives (6TB each) and using software to keep data synchronized. I plan to run the PLEX server on my HP Envy Phoenix 860st (4.0 GHz Intel Quad Core i7-6700 processor, 16 GB DDR4-2133 DIMM (2x8GB) RAM, Liquid Cooling System), and leave on 24/7.

I’m looking to your experience with multiple NAS drives and synchronization software. Requirements include:

  • 3.0 USB port(s)
  • Single-bay drive
  • 6TB capacity
  • Fast file transfer speed
  • DLNA certified
  • Can be set to switch off during overnight (optional)
  • Ability to sync with or back up to another NAS
  • Hardware-assisted encryption

What NAS brand and/or synchronization software would you recommend? Discuss your good/bad experience?

Thanks in advance…

2

pretty much any NAS in the world is going to let you do a periodic sync using rsync.

Single disk NAS devices are a bit of a waste of time, why would use not just hang 2 USB enclosures from your server machine and use it to sync between them?

3

You can have a 2bay NAS and don’t use raid and have one drive back up to the other.

But save up and buy a 4bay. Same goes NO raid - have 2 drives backup to the other 2

4

Good points.

It might make sense to have the primary storage reside on a NAS, and the backup copy on a DAS. We’re starting with about 3TB of media on the NAS in a Public share, but plan to store DVR media as well. On the same network, we have several PC’s, iPads, iPhones, XBOX (NAS Blu-ray movies), Bose SoundTouch (NAS music), and three ROKU boxes (one each for 1080i, 1080p, and 2160p HDTV’s). Our family documents (business, tax files, etc) would be encrypted on my SSD drive and backup on DAS for now. That was the thought process behind a NAS. I’m still sorting through how it all fits together.

The reason for implementing my current plan is based on:

  1. I don’t want to risk having the NAS fail and not accessing either drive in a dual-bay NAS.
  2. I prefer both NAS to have separate NIC’s, separate electrical sources, and separate physical locations.
  3. other family members are not computer literate so accessing a drive off my desktop PC may not be as straight forward with security issues, etc.
  4. I prefer to have each copy of data appear exactly the same way, same folder structure, etc. Only the IP would be different.
  5. ease of use so when one drive fails, family members can be taught how to access the second NAS on the network until the first NAS is replaced and data is copied from the backup NAS.

NEW QUESTIONS

  1. Can Rsync copy from NAS to DAS? or only NAS to NAS? Does it reside on a PC or the NAS?
  2. Do NAS units have built-in health check programs? As I mentioned, my last 4TB NAS failed with no warning. Fortunately I had a backup of 15,000+ pic’s, music, and home video, but not 150 movies since I didn’t have room. I won’t make that mistake again. The movies, I’ll need to rip again.

Thanks for your input.

5

I have had no joy with any of the synology backup software.
I have 3 NAS. 2 Synology and a drobo.
Might not be the best solution but I run a scheduled backup thru a win10 box from the big nas (raid) (8 drives) split sending data to nas2 (JBOD)(4) and nas3 (Raid) (5) using SyncBackFree.

And Synology has hard drives checks