Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in

Why NAS for Backup

Inside Guide: Making the Most of NAS for Backup
By
Brought to you by What's this

As noted earlier, those with relatively small backup needs don’t necessarily require NAS. As a backup device for a single system, NAS shouldn’t be necessary at all unless for aesthetic reasons (avoiding visible cable clutter, etc.). Serving as a backup target for multiple systems and devices, though, NAS offers several benefits.

First and foremost, NAS combats device sprawl and disorganization. Certainly, half a dozen SOHO computing devices can be backed up onto a single USB drive, including via SD card adapters, but such an approach is almost always haphazard and begs for accidents to occur. (“Did I back up that second notebook? Oh, well — next time for sure.”) Some users might take the approach of having one USB backup drive for each computing device, but the cost inefficiency of this approach should be obvious. In both cases, unless a dual-drive mirror is being used, no redundancy protects the external storage solution, and no on-drive intelligence works to alert users to impending failures. Adding multiple versions of a file across multiple systems only compounds the problem. Keeping track of which backup device has which version at any given time can turn into a management nightmare, even for home users.

NAS either minimizes or eliminates all of these problems. Right at the outset, there’s no plugging necessary. Devices either connect via Ethernet or Wi-Fi to the LAN, and the NAS always sits on the network, usually over a gigabit Ethernet connection. So long as automatic, properly configured backup software stays running on clients, there should never be a time when devices get caught not backing up to centralized storage according to their schedules. Also keep in mind that NAS means never having to move a backup drive from machine to machine. Time and logistics aside, this negates the risk of dropping drives between systems — perhaps a laughable prospect if we hadn’t seen such rampant evidence of it being a widespread phenomenon.

As of this writing, a 2 TB USB 3.0 drive sells in the $80 to $100 range while a decently reviewed one-bay, 2 TB consumer NAS starts around $130. All told, this seems like a small premium to pay for stepping into some of the many centralizing advantages of NAS. However, the single-drive NAS concept still rankles for several reasons. For example, some of these low-end NAS products can connect to the network via Wi-Fi, which may be great for convenience and reducing cable clutter, but it essentially takes the 100+ MB/s speed of the hard drive and chokes it down to the 10 MB/s or less typical of many 802.11n adapters. Another reason, of course, is because one-bay NAS offers no data protection. Right now, we see two-bay NAS enclosures (diskless) on Amazon starting at only $80. With a couple of 1 TB drives, costs start at $140. This is such a modest cost for protecting years of valuable data that it’s hard to fathom why anyone wouldn’t do this.

Unless, for only an incremental amount more, they wanted the protection of true RAID.