Thank you for the correction on this! I had a DAS RAID enclosure about 7 years ago or so from Pegasus. IIRC, it had a hardware controller that failed on me while I was on vacation. I didn’t have it set up as RAID 5 (even if I did, it wouldn’t have mattered), and because I was on vacation and didn’t receive any emails about the failure or anything (another area where Synology would be useful), the failure corrupted my backup drives too. So I lost several years of work.
Even talking about this reminds me that Synology at least has all these alert systems built in. I’m wary of the security issues for QNAP when it comes to NAS (obviously, a DAS is a different story). I could connect everything via a Mac Mini, but if it fails, it would probably fail silently. Which, for my use case (professional archival storage and backups), would be a very risky proposition.
I have a QNAP attached to a Mac Mini - I didn’t suggest that to you because it sounds like you’d have to get both the QNAP and the Mini.
But realistically - what do you mean by “fail silently”? The QNAP has management software that monitors the array’s health. If it’s attached to a computer, it would almost certainly report things on that computer. And if you never even look at that computer, never look at the status lights on the array, etc. it could potentially fail without you seeing the notification - but that’s where Backblaze with 1-year retention comes in.
By “fail silently,” I mean do what my last RAID did, where it failed silently and that proliferated to all my other backups without my knowing. But that does seem unlikely with tools like Backblaze, you have a fair point.
A big attraction to this for me is removing drives from my desk and getting that noise out of my office, so I would prefer the remote hard drive option. Just a Q of if I’d prefer two Synologies or one QNAP attached to a Mac Mini (that does seem theoretically easier, though, especially if I can configure reporting via that QNAP somehow to arrive to an email instead of on that machine exclusively).
Right. So the way I see it right now, my solutions are either (for my needs):
Two Synologies, one remote and one local to my network, clones of each other. Back up one to Backblaze. Con: expensive purchase, with expensive monthly bills. Pro: reliable, purpose-built for this, flexible for other things (server usage, etc).
DAS QNAP mounted to a remote Mac Mini. Back up the Mac and QNAP to Backblaze. Clone the QNAP to another hard drive plugged in to the remote Mac nightly with something like Carbon Copy.
A few questions about option 2:
Does anybody know if you can configure a QNAP DAS to email you if something goes wrong with one the drives in it?
Could I use a 4-bay enclosure in RAID 5? If so, can I configure it so it is “partitioned” for two different Time Machine backups (two other Macs), as well as general archive storage, without dedicating one drive to each of those purposes?
In this scenario, could the QNAP archive disk be seen as mounted storage in media applications like Resolve or Lightroom Classic? (This is a key perk of Synology for me.)
If something happens to one of my Macs, could I plug the QNAP directly into it for a Time Machine restore? If a Time Machine backup is spread across multiple disks (as described in question 2), I feel like this won’t be possible, but I don’t know.
Sorry, one more question to add to my list about using a QNAP DAS attached to a remote Mac Mini. Perhaps @webwalrus would be best able to answer this (although I’d welcome anybody’s input): could you run a server on the QNAP like you could a Synology? It might be interesting to run some web dev on the QNAP, so the URL generated could theoretically be available across the whole network on multiple devices for easy testing.
In theory, this could be done on the Mac Mini too, but then I would also need to start backing up the Mac Mini, and suddenly that Mac is no longer just dumb terminal access to hard drive space.
The raid array should look like a single drive which can then be partitioned into multiple drives. My 16TB drive array has a Time Machine Partition, two partitions for media (not a single partition because historically I used two separate drives and I wanted the configuration to be compatible), and a fourth partition of archival data storage.
As far as I know all QNAP devices are NAS not DAS. If you are using a DAS (like the ones sold by OWC) connected to a mini, as you option “2” in your earlier post, then you would naturally be backing up the DAS through the mini using BackBlaze running on the mini.
This is very helpful, thanks! @webwalrus pointed me to a 4 bay QNAP DAS. Depends on its other capabilities. I have found researching this frustrating difficult. I don’t know all the insider terminology to express what I want to do. Hence this thread. Thanks for your patience with me all!
No. The DAS is a storage array, not a server. But you can run a server on the Mac Mini, and it can use the QNAP for storage.
For some background, the TR-004 and TR-004U (rackmount version) are effectively RAID expansion modules that can be coupled with the QNAP NAS products. As such, they have the RAID capability on-device - but they aren’t designed to run software themselves.
The QNAP software allows you to group drives into volumes, each of which function like a single drive. Obviously there’s a limit to how much rejiggering you can do with 4 bays, but that’s how it works.
The TR-004 and TR-004U are DAS, not NAS. They’re just a drive array. See the note above.
You’d be doing this with Backblaze anyway, as Backblaze backs up a computer.
I run a Mini as a server with Plex, file sharing, and other misc. stuff on it. I could very easily also run a web server on the Mini, and use the QNAP for the document root.
Thanks my friend! I appreciate your input. Still not sure about the best direction to go, but I don’t know what would firm that up for me at this point. Thanks again.
Are you a programmer? This sounds similar to good C++ advice. But yes, good point! Just dumb remote storage for wireless use and backups is probably the right answer. Let a real server be a server, etc.
OK, one bike ride later and I feel I have some clarity on this. But just to confirm: if you have a hard drive mounted on a remote Mac, is it usable as a media repo in an app like Lightroom Classic or DaVinci?
I know nothing about Lightroom and DaVinci, but I can tell you the network drive mounts on the local filesystem at /Volumes/DriveName. I would THINK that if the media location is configurable, you’d be able to point it to there.
The only question IMHO would be whether there’d be some inefficiency caused by the network mount that would make it problematic.
Yeah, I think that would mount then. I could probably test this just by setting up our second laptop as a network share temporarily and plugging my current photo drive in.
There would be inefficiencies if the media was being used for active projects, but this is just for archival. Having it visible makes it easy to review past work if I need to, and to view an entire Lightroom catalog at once (for example). So I’d be viewing everything, but not editing it at that point.
@webwalrus sorry my friend, a couple more questions for you about this unit (if you don’t mind).
Did you use QNAP’s software to configure it? Does doing that prevent other Macs (without QNAP’s software) from recognizing it if you plug it in?
If a drive fails, how does QNAP alert you? You mentioned earlier it just alerts the host machine — is it just a notification, or can you configure that behaviour?
I noticed it doesn’t have SMART monitoring built in for the drives, so I guess the failure is the only time you find out something is wrong?
Finally bit the bullet and set the Mac mini and its attached external drive to never sleep. Now wireless Time Machine backups for my M1 MacBook Air seem to happen reliably.
My Kill A Watt gadget shows the 2014 Mac mini running between 7W and 30W with its small display (which I wouldn’t strictly need) clocking in at 8W.
I’m just talking about storing the media within the catalog, not the catalog itself, but it’s worth highlighting this in case folks stumble on this thread via Google in the future. Thanks for this!
I personally can’t use Lightroom CC for the amount of media I have, and remain all-in on Classic. I’d spend an astronomical amount to store my image media with Adobe otherwise.
So I don’t see why you want to use one of these for non intended use, since it appears to be intended only as expansion for a QNAP NAS. Or is there something missing here like you already have one or they are incredibly inexpensive to purchase?
Adobe certainly did not help things by choosing and then changing confusing names for their Lightroom offerings.
Lightroom (formerly Lightroom CC) now appears to be ten bucks a month while Lightroom Classic has jumped up to twenty bucks. (Were existing subscribers to Lightroom Classic grandfathered in at the old ten bucks a month price, I wonder?)
It can be used as a DAS. It’s one of the use cases on their product page. They’re also very cheap, offer hardware RAID instead of requiring softRAID, so they can be used on any computer, etc. Only bummer I can find is that there is no SMART monitoring built in.
