Synology Died After 10 years, What Next?

[jabbr]

On 1/16/2023 at 7:09 PM, Jud said:

Thoughts:

 

- TrueNAS Scale is a great idea.  It's Ubuntu (edit: sorry, Debian)+TrueNAS, which gives you access to two active communities with any questions. I think that would be preferable to something like OWC SoftRAID, which is not as widely adopted nor does it have the reputation and pedigree for ironclad operation that TrueNAS/ZFS does.

 

- TrueNAS Scale also gives you the option of rolling your own storage solution rather than being locked in to a vendor's. With as much storage and possible expansion as you may be needing, I have a feeling that will be an important consideration.

 

I once had a hardware RAID which died and used a proprietary filesystem. I was locked into buying another board to access my data. What if the vendor goes out of business or doesn't make the board anymore, or changes the onboard format? Ever since then I want nothing to do with vendor specific RAID.

 

With TrueNAS (and other NAS that use OpenZFS) your hardware could die and you can literally plop the drives into other hardware that runs OpenZFS. You can also upgrade storage space by removing one drive of a mirror or RAID and then installing another, letting it heal/resilver, and then replacing the other drive and voila!

 

QNAP business class uses ZFS also so the vendor choice is moot regarding this issue. 

 

Synology typically uses BTRFS which is a ZFS 'competitor' on Linux, so its a reasonable option though I haven't used it. Linux likely will be around a long time ;)

[jabbr]

On 1/19/2023 at 6:11 PM, ericuco said:

 

My NAS is a single bay Synology with a 2TB drive and an attached USB drive that I use to backup the NAS drive. I actually have two USB drives where one is connected to the NAS for backup purposes and the other resides in a deposit box at the bank for offsite storage. I swap out the USB drives every few months.

Synology will have rsync installed, and that's an easy way to update an external USB drive.

 

I don't know how frequently Synology checks the filesystem for errors (bitrot) but be sure to check before syncing a USB drive because you might propagate errors that way, alternatively keep your drive as a mirror and when you check, you can also --repair the mirror (hence the name resilver). Because checksums are saved, then it can tell which copy of the mirror is the good copy.