I started by looking for some method of backing up family photos offsite for a few family members at each others houses to protect against fire, flood,disk failure etc and landed here.
I’m currently looking into some hardware for my mum to get that is set and forget as I don’t want to spend ages supporting it long term.
It needs to be simple for her to use so I thought a nas would be ideal. She saves her photos in a certain folder and as if by magic they’re backed up!
I’m looking to spend less than £100 and hoping for 2tb storage for that. The WD mycloud 2tb is currently £99.
I’m quite happy to mess about setting that up but wondered before I go through the effort, are there any better options?
Do any nas drives support syncthing natively?
Are there other options I should be considering? The only requirement is that once set it must be simple to use.
Before you commit to your plan, consider carefully the difference between file backup (or archiving) versus file syncronization.
Syncthing is a terrific way to quickly distribute photos to various family member devices across the internet. But it is not an archiving system. Unless your devices are carefully configured, any one user can delete a shared photo … and this deletion will occur on all devices. (Bye bye pic.) Also, read the docs about creating a “Master” device in a cluster, and also look at the “versioning” feature.
I use Syncthing to share my photos 'cuz it works perfectly for this purpose, but I also use backup software to archive them somewhere that’s secure.
I doubt there are any NAS devices that natively support Syncthing. There are community contributed versions available for Synology (I have this) and QNAP, look here:
In respect to the difference between synchronisation and backup. Keep in mind it is not just user actions you need to be wary off.
I primarily keep backups for fear of hardware failure and data corruption.
If your data gets corrupted and synching reads it as a change the corruption will be propogated to the other devices, i.e. your backups.
Thanks both for your replies. Is it possible to set syncthing to only add to a folder. That way if a file were deleted in the master folder accidently it wouldn’t be deleted in the slave.
Thank you all for your help. I’ve now got this up and running on:
Dlink DNS 320L (very easy setup guide here - http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=61453.0) n.b. you must be on a relatively recent firmware version to get the option to install addons from the web gui (I wasted hours here!)
WD Mycloud - NAS - WD My Cloud (I tried to do this with the latest firmware as an experiment but it didn’t work - in doing some further research with the 4.x firmware WD seem to have made the device check certificates of software.
Ubuntu server.
All are playing nicely together.
I’m now in the process of tweaking “file version” settings, “master” folders & “ignore delete” to get what I’m after.