Comment on Do I need a NAS ?
Bwaz@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Beware, an NAS will have its own file formats and structure. I put all my music files and backups on a NAS, which failed. Now I can’t recover them without buying another NAS of similar model. More ore less the opposite of why I got a NAS.
No sane NAS should work that way.
Unless you have a giant raid array, where you need all the drives running at the same time on the same system, plugging in a single raid 0 member, for example, via usb to sata adapter, should let access its contents just fine.
Provided you’re on an OS that can read the file system. That can require some extra effort on windows.
Many NAS work like that though. Hardware RAID always seems to work like that so if you get a fancy card that supports RAID you been make sure you have a good long term support contract that will be there for you when there are problems (if you are not paying hundreds of thousands per year you don't have a good support contract)
Not all are that way. Many run ZFS which is great for this and you can replace broken hardware and recover. BTFS is commonly used as well, probably not as good as zfs but likely good enough.
This is a qualified truth. In theory what you’re saying is true but for example with Synology they use their own raid format and while they ostensibly use btrfs they overlay their own metadata system on top.
Indeed.
I’m not saying there aren’t NASes that do this. Unfortunately, there absolutely are.
Was this Synology by chance?
Terramaster.
Gotcha. I face similar issues with Synology. Their hyper backup format doesn’t seem to be standard. I’m considering setting up Borg Backup for offsite so I can restore it onto non Synology devices later.
xana@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
This is also one reason why I am hesitant for a NAS. They might run on their own OS and have their own private format while I dont want to be vendor locked in in any ecosystem
folekaule@lemmy.world 4 months ago
True open source products are your best bet. TruNAS and Proxmox are popular options, but you can absolutely set up a vanilla Debian server with Samba and call it a NAS. Back in the old days we just called those “file servers”.
Most importantly, just keep good backups. If you have to choose between investing in a raid or a primary + backup drive, choose the latter every time. Raid will save you time to recover, but it’s not a backup.