I’m planning on setting up a home server of sorts that will automatically backup the two Macs in my household as well as keep an offline copy of my wife and I’s iCloud Photo Library. The goal is to have a Mac mini connected to two separate external hard drives. One for media storage (think Plex server) and a multi-bay external drive enclosure for data backup.
Its the latter that I’m looking for recommendations on. I’d like a 2 or 4 bay enclosure that I can expand and it would obviously need to be reliable and compatible with the Mac mini. Initially I’ll probably start with 8 or 12 TB of storage, and expand as required. It should have a USB-C connection, but doesn’t have to be Thunderbolt. The enclosure doesn’t necessarily have to support RAID, as I plan to back up that enclosure to the cloud via Backblaze.
Not sure if this is what you’re after, but Terramaster do a range of direct attached enclosures in a variety of capacities - just fit the disk drives that you need, HDD or SSD. I know you don’t need RAID, but this is an example of what I mean
Another vote for OWC’s ThunderBay enclosures. I have two OWC ThunderBay 4s, one with SSDs and one with spinning disks, both attached to my Mac Studio. They’ve been rock-solid reliable. Neither is set up as a RAID, both are JBODs.
I believe the answer is yes, but just to be sure, one of these enclosure set up in RAID, counts as an external disk that BackBlaze will back up for no extra cost, correct?
Yes, they are determining this by the connection type – so anything on USB/Thunderbolt/Firewire is an ‘external drive’ (as long as it does not show up as a network share in Finder).
There is a FAQ stating that. See also this post on reddit [once reddit comes back up as it seems to have gone down entirely at the moment].
I’m going to give a +1 to any enclosure by OWC. Never had any fail and I’ve bought maybe 10 of them over the years. I’ve only had to toss them when the interface technology becomes obsolete (FW400 anyone?). Most of their enclosures only support Software RAID, so no RAID controller in the enclosure itself.
I would recommend a Synology NAS on your home network. You can choose the number and size of hard drives, select RAID options, and it’s already in an enclosure.
With a Synology NAS, you can set up many types of backup. I have my home iMac and MBP backing up to my Synology daily (using Arq for incremental backups) and monthly (using Synology’s software, which is quite good, for “complete” backups). I have Hazel set up to make extra backups of my photos and my Zotero library whenever those things change. I even back-up my other cloud accounts like Dropbox to my Synology. So a NAS gives you a lot of flexibility. In my opinion, it would be the best option for multiple devices needing a place to backup stuff.
You can set up your Synology to back itself up to another offsite Synology or to Backblaze or any other location, that way you also keep an offsite copy.
(Synology is not only used for backup, but you can set up shared folders as well, so it has the added benefit of functioning as your private cloud storage solution. That’s how I access many things from my MBP on my iPhone/iPad.)
Depending on your needs, you might consider an attached drive on each Mac for the purpose of TimeMachine backups.
Synology NAS won’t back up to Backblaze - at least not as part of the standard monthly plan.
I have a QNAP TR-004 DAS. Its weakness is that you can’t add new drives to an existing RAID setup - but I like it just fine for what it does. I bought the enclosure and 4 8 TB drives, set up a 24 TB RAID 5 setup (three drives for storage, one for parity), and called it good. These days that would cost about $800-$900, depending on what 8 TB drives you bought.
Right you have to set up a separate B2 version, which is not cheap. I just pay Synology $70 a year for a 1TB of important files back up (and it is more feature rich than BB). That is why the DAS RAID storage is very attractive to me. But as I said, Synology Drive is so good, I am not sure I would want to give that up regardless.
We are talking about 2 different BB products. With the monthly computer version, you could back up your whole computer plus all attached drives with no limits. So, for $120 for 2 years I think it is, you can back up everything. To back up a Synology to BB you have to use their B2 service. I don’t remember the amounts, but when I was doing the comparison, BB was slightly cheaper than direct through Synology, which is $70/year for 1TB. Depending on your setup, to back up the whole thing would get expensive.
On BB you only see the disk images, not the individual files that were uploaded. With Synology’s back up you can see each file on the cloud. Maybe not important to all, but a nice touch. Also you have to learn how to use B2, while easy, is not as straightforward as using Synology’s service.
Point being, it is much easier and cheaper to back up a a DAS device than it is a Synology. I love my Synology, but I am not sure it is the ideal solution for most.
Edit: You said $6/month. So it is slightly more expensive than Synology, and looking at it, it costs more if you ever need to download your data. So, I standby what I said.
Ah, yes, I stand corrected - $6 per terabyte per month, not $5.
Which option is cheaper for storage depends on how your data scales. Backblaze B2 bills you for exactly what you use, with the cost being $6 / terabyte per month, pro-rated. So 1.1 TB is $6.60, 200 gigabytes is $1.20, etc. Synology scales based on certain price tiers (100 GB, 100 GB, 1 TB, and per-terabyte after that).
And yes, Backblaze charges egress fees. Synology doesn’t. Again, which one is better depends on your anticipated use case.
Yes, but my original point was that Synology NAS are great, but they are a heck of a lot more money to back up than a Mac with a DAS as a file server. Unless a person really likes the software packages Synology offers, a RAID DAS might be a better option. My biggest dislike about my NAS is I have all this space, but I don’t have a cost effective way to back it all up.
Since I have a couple of Windows 11 machines, I appreciate that the Synology works just as well with them as my Macs. Not that I have had many issues in the modern era with Macs and PCs communicating.
IMHO, forget the NAS. Just use a base Mac mini for a server and connect external disks (DAS) as needed. Everything is uniformly on macOS and a Backblaze account on the server can back up your entire house for $99/year.
Agreed! I ditched my NAS for DAS, ditched CrashPlan for Backblaze, and never looked back. And although I know there are situations in which it’s a genuine necessity, none of them apply to me, so I don’t bother with RAID anymore, either.
Agreed, except Synology Drive. It’s like having your own private Dropbox/iCloud that works with everything. It’s been flawless in the year I have used it. No mounting drives or logging in, it just works. That said, if I did it all over, I would use a Mini with DAS as a file server.
