Help me with buying NAS

[WTFH]

oh yeh, put your 'critical' data on someone else's server.
Great Idea.

If your only backups are onsite, then all it takes is a fire, flood or burglary to lose it all.
For stuff that is important, I have local online and offline backups as well as cloud backups with two different companies.

[malvolio]

oh yeh, put your 'critical' data on someone else's server.
Great Idea.

For once, we are in agreement. Setting up a local NAS is simple enough, after that it should just work.

For anyone using the cloud as prime storage, make sure you know how you recover a single file you have inadvertently deleted. It may not be as simple as you might think.

[Dorkeaux]

I don't think anyone here was suggesting using the cloud as the primary storage for critical data.
A good possibility for backup, though.

[malvolio]

I don't think anyone here was suggesting using the cloud as the primary storage for critical data.
A good possibility for backup, though.

But still potentially fails my criterion for single file recovery...

Plus a local backup will avoid errors when your internet goes down or restarts in the middle of a process.

[jamesbrown]

oh yeh, put your 'critical' data on someone else's server.
Great Idea.

You could store everything locally on a NAS and take measures to prevent remote access (no UPnP, port forwarding, firewall restricted to local IPs), keep the software up-to-date and patched, and then have an additional local backup, ensuring everything is encrypted and that the encrypted keys are copied to multiple places. Leaves you pretty vulnerable to fire and flood, though. So then you need another secure physical location, which you may or may not have.

Unless you have multiple (secure) physical locations, cloud storage is pretty much a no-brainer as a backup. To be perfectly honest, unless you know what you're doing and you keep everything up-to-date, I would wager that your local NAS or even non-network-attached local backup (unless encrypted) is more vulnerable than a cloud server - they aren't invulnerable, of course, but they are at least stood up and maintained by people that, on the whole, know a lot more about secure networking than your average punter with a NAS.

[WTFH]

But still potentially fails my criterion for single file recovery...

Plus a local backup will avoid errors when your internet goes down or restarts in the middle of a process.

The OP wasn’t asking about file backups or security, and no one has suggested that the sole or primary backup should be on the cloud.
This isn’t about “single file recovery” but file sharing.
Reading the requirements is a key to coming up with a solution. If you state something that is a solution to what you know about and then have to twist the requirements to suit that solution, then you probably worked for one of the big 5 in the 80s and 90s .

[ladymuck]

My OneDrive backs up to my NAS Did I get that the right way round?

[malvolio]

The OP wasn’t asking about file backups or security, and no one has suggested that the sole or primary backup should be on the cloud.
This isn’t about “single file recovery” but file sharing.
Reading the requirements is a key to coming up with a solution. If you state something that is a solution to what you know about and then have to twist the requirements to suit that solution, then you probably worked for one of the big 5 in the 80s and 90s .

b
Or perhaps i was building high availability clustered mainframes in the 80s and 90s, including introducing RAID arrays and disaster tolerant services?

Just a thought...

[vwdan]

b
Or perhaps i was building high availability clustered mainframes in the 80s and 90s, including introducing RAID arrays and disaster tolerant services?

Just a thought...

Maybe that's why your view on cloud backup is so out of kilter? Pretty much any cloud backup solution will have versioning and point in time restores of single files. Even CrashPlan does and that's crap.

For the benefit anybody reading, I use Backblaze and it's excellent - plus you can pay for indefinite retention of deleted files if you're paranoid about deleting something and not realising.

I think in 2026 a cloud backup solution is the no brainer to meet the "1" bit of 3-2-1.

[WTFH]

b
Or perhaps i was building high availability clustered mainframes in the 80s and 90s, including introducing RAID arrays and disaster tolerant services?

Just a thought...

Not what the OP was asking for. Anyway, in the early 90s I was speccing off-site backups, e.g. replicating the complete server structure at a secondary plant 20 miles away, because having RAID isn't going to be much good for disaster recovery if the disaster is the server room being blown up. Or a simpler one where a company had what looked like a big generator around 50m from the main building. It was actually a small generator and a server backup connected with redundant fibre cables. We weren't replicating just the data, we were replicating servers. The storage systems with the servers were generally RAID 5, but basically it was RAID 1 over RAID 5.

...but again, your "solution" may be the perfect answer for a business stuck politically and technologically in the 1980s. Home computing and home networks are quite a bit different to the days of playing Jetset Willy on a 16k Spectrum or having VAX terminals.