Crashed external HDD with all my photos

[Citysnaps]

It’s a huge convenience, but many people can get along with just rotating a couple of external drives if they don’t need the capacity or fault tolerance of a NAS (or its other features, like acting as a Time Capsule for Time Machine backups, a Plex server, etc.)

I'm happy to see this discussion popping up again. You might remember kicking this around on another thread 3-4 months ago, where I was contemplating using a NAS direct ethernet connected to my main computer and then having the NAS ethernet connected (via one of its other RJ-45s) to a switch (and other stuff) in a closet to further distribute around the house via Ethernet and three ceiling mounted WiFi APs.

I'm still on the fence about the NAS option.

On the one hand, my wife and I have used TM and clones to back up our computers for a long time. With multiple backups for redundancy, some offsite. Easy peasy. For both of us. Never a problem or issue.

On the other, I keep getting tugged setting up a NAS and centralizing all that to one box in one location. A big part of that is the lure of learning something new with a nice shiny new piece of tech to discover. That's me being a tech junkie who lives to fool around with tech stuff. But that's not my wife (she's an artist), who doesn't mind tech, but doesn't get excited about it. I do think it makes sense from an organizational and easy semi-automated backup/redundancy point of view.

And that leads to encumbering additional complexity over TM/clones that have met our needs for years. Still weighing that. If I was single, for sure as I like leaning/playing with new stuff. If I became incapacitated for some reason, or kicked the bucket, would my wife staring at a black box full of disk drives be able to carry on with that system? I think that could be a pretty big ask if that should happen.

So...still on the fence.

 

[Cmaier]

Okay, I'm thinking 4 bays may be a better option so I can plan for growth, something like this

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-DS920-Diskless-4-bay/dp/B087Z34F3R/ref=sr_1_3?crid=9I4QEO2GPZB3&keywords=synology&qid=1658151372&sprefix=synologoy%2Caps%2C356&sr=8-3

As for drives, I checked out the Seagate Ironwolf that @mollyc shared but it looks like these are SATA, is that preferred over SD (not sure what is or isn't supported in the NAS).

Thanks for all the help here you two, if I can recover this drive it'll be the last time I use a non-redundant system.

SATA is fine. FWIW, that box supports two SSDs as well, for cache. I wouldn’t bother. If you do decide to use a cache, set it up as “read only.” Read/write caches can end up crashing your volume if an SSD fails, and there are a lot of reports of that happening to people. I have two SSDs in one of my boxes, set up as a read cache. Although I have a very high cache hit rate, which means it is doing its job, I see no practical difference in performance vs. the boxes that don’t have caches set up.

 

[Eric]

SATA is fine. FWIW, that box supports two SSDs as well, for cache. I wouldn’t bother. If you do decide to use a cache, set it up as “read only.” Read/write caches can end up crashing your volume if an SSD fails, and there are a lot of reports of that happening to people. I have two SSDs in one of my boxes, set up as a read cache. Although I have a very high cache hit rate, which means it is doing its job, I see no practical difference in performance vs. the boxes that don’t have caches set up.

Got it, so this is what I'm looking at right now and I'm a little confused about "digital storage capacity" here, does that mean it's the max it will allow for drives or is it just internal? I would like to be able to put a couple of 6 or 8 TB drives into it and want to be sure I can do that.

Also, you mentioned Plex, any issues getting that setup? Would be a shame if I couldn't watch all my Benny Hill episodes from any room.

 

[mollyc]

I have a Synology DS920+ with 6TB drives in each bay.

 

[Eric]

I have a Synology DS920+ with 6TB drives in each bay.

So you are only using 2 of the bays? I'm thinking I will go with the DS720+ and two Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD. I'll still have a couple of external SSD drives that I'm not sure how to put to use but I'll figure something out for them.

 

[Cmaier]

Got it, so this is what I'm looking at right now and I'm a little confused about "digital storage capacity" here, does that mean it's the max it will allow for drives or is it just internal? I would like to be able to put a couple of 6 or 8 TB drives into it and want to be sure I can do that.
View attachment 15944

Also, you mentioned Plex, any issues getting that setup? Would be a shame if I couldn't watch all my Benny Hill episodes from any room.

the 2gb must be the dram that is included. (on most synology boxes you can upgrade - I’ve done that on each of mine, which is helpful if you are running apps like Plex on there).

You can definitely stick even 12tb or higher drives in there.

No problems installing Plex at all, at least on my boxes (I don’t know if the lower-end boxes behave differently). Essentially you get a user interface via the web that looks like a mac desktop, and you can install apps right from an app manager, where Plex is one of the choices.

I recently got fancy and installed a newer version of Plex manually (the version via the built-in App Store always lags behind), which was also pretty easy other than having to manually set up an IP address for the web interface.

Even though I have Plex running, I usually just use Apple’s “home sharing” via the TV app to stream to my apple TV’s. For that purpose I have one of my mac’s set up to home share, and I have simply added all the videos to my library on that mac.

Plex works much better if you are streaming to an iPad or iOS device, or a non-Apple device (like my Anker mini projector).

Anyway, here’s a screen shot i just took that shows what it looks like when you are setting this sort of stuff up.

 

[mollyc]

So you are only using 2 of the bays? I'm thinking I will go with the DS720+ and two Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD. I'll still have a couple of external SSD drives that I'm not sure how to put to use but I'll figure something out for them.

no i have four drives. two are used for data and two are used to back up the first two in raid.

 

[Cmaier]

So you are only using 2 of the bays? I'm thinking I will go with the DS720+ and two Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD. I'll still have a couple of external SSD drives that I'm not sure how to put to use but I'll figure something out for them.

These things have USB ports, so you should be able to set it up so that whenever you plug them into the NAS, itself, stuff backs up onto them, for example. (I don’t do that, but I know the capability exists in the synology operating system for that sort of thing).

 

[Eric]

Got it, pulled the trigger. Still going to hope the SATA to usb cable that comes later today will get me access to the crashed drive, then I'll start the process of getting everything off it into the NAS. I'll also have to deal with configuration changes to LR catalogue files and remapping all my Plex stuff which is usually a huge pain in the ass. But once it's all done I'll be glad to have some redundancy.

 

[Eric]

Just wanted to follow up here, you guys have offered great advice and I really appreciate it.

• Synology SAN all setup with two 6TB drives, configured with SHR, redundancy to both drives simultaneously
• Was able to salvage all of my photos with the SATA cable but it took a bit of doing
• Setup, configured and migrated all my PLEX data, much better on a dedicated system like this
• Setup my LRC as follows
  • Catalog on my local system
  • Images stored on the SAN
  • Setup 1:1 previews for all existing photos, will also import with same settings going forward (should keep things nice and fast)
  • Will backup through the "would you like to backup" dialogue to an the SAN upon exiting once a week or so

So far so good, I'll also be setting up Time Machine backups to point to these as well for all of our other systems. No offsite as of yet but at least I'll have some redundancy.

 

[Cmaier]

Just wanted to follow up here, you guys have offered great advice and I really appreciate it.

• Synology SAN all setup with two 6TB drives, configured with SHR, redundancy to both drives simultaneously
• Was able to salvage all of my photos with the SATA cable but it took a bit of doing
• Setup, configured and migrated all my PLEX data, much better on a dedicated system like this
• Setup my LRC as follows
  • Catalog on my local system
  • Images stored on the SAN
  • Setup 1:1 previews for all existing photos, will also import with same settings going forward (should keep things nice and fast)
  • Will backup through the "would you like to backup" dialogue to an the SAN upon exiting once a week or so

So far so good, I'll also be setting up Time Machine backups to point to these as well for all of our other systems. No offsite as of yet but at least I'll have some redundancy.

For the time machine, my suggestion is to create a new user (like “tmbackup“ or whatever) on the synology box, and to impose a quota for that user. otherwise the Time Machine backups just keep growing until they take over the whole volume.

 

[Eric]

After deleting at least 1TB and not seeing any changes on the SAN storage I learned about Synology's proprietary recycle folder, I was like why TF isn't this showing my free space.

 

[DT]

• Was able to salvage all of my photos with the SATA cable but it took a bit of doing

Holy smokes, when you said you were concerned about recovering them, I was having panic attacks. I've had a few close calls in the past with various files, it's a terrible feeling.

Now, since 99.9% of our photos are on iPhones, we have them backed up several times (device, iCloud, local Photos, local Photos library in Backblaze and weekly images, and I even use Google Photos for another copy).

 

[Cmaier]

After deleting at least 1TB and not seeing any changes on the SAN storage I learned about Synology's proprietary recycle folder, I was like why TF isn't this showing my free space.

Ah, yes. I turned that off in most of my shares. I only have it on for the one where I archive code projects.

 

[Eric]

Ah, yes. I turned that off in most of my shares. I only have it on for the one where I archive code projects.

Overall I'm loving this thing, great little piece of hardware that's perfect for home use.

 

[Cmaier]

Overall I'm loving this thing, great little piece of hardware that's perfect for home use.

Yeah, they are pretty great. I’m disappointed they are making their bigger boxes less friendly (things like only certifying their own brand of hard drives and then turning off SMART features if you use anything else), but they’ve been good to me over the years.

 

[Citysnaps]

Overall I'm loving this thing, great little piece of hardware that's perfect for home use.

Oh stop it! I'm getting a case of the shakes and the day is just beginning.

 

[Eric]

Oh stop it! I'm getting a case of the shakes and the day is just beginning.

It took me almost losing all of my work to make the change, now at least I feel more comfortable with it all. The price is not bad for what you get, I basically set it up in my server/laundry room with the router and connected everything in the house to it. Now everything in my home is backed up on a regular basis to two redundant drives.

 

[Citysnaps]

I'll be setting up a new computer over the next couple of days. At the moment I'm debating Migration Assistant vs clean install vs a combination of both, coming from a 2016 5K iMac main computer. Complicating that, I have some older laptops I haven't used in awhile (and will likely never use again) plus my current laptop, that have files/photos on them but not on my iMac. Shame on me for the mess.

And with the above, carefully revisiting the idea of setting up a NAS. Going slow on the whole process, not wanting to make a bad decision or a stupid mistake.

Appreciate reading the dialog between you and Cmaier above.

 

[Eric]

I'll be setting up a new computer over the next couple of days. At the moment I'm debating Migration Assistant vs clean install vs a combination of both, coming from a 2016 5K iMac main computer. Complicating that, I have some older laptops I haven't used in awhile (and will likely never use again) plus my current laptop, that have files/photos on them but not on my iMac. Shame on me for the mess.

And with the above, carefully revisiting the idea of setting up a NAS. Going slow on the whole process, not wanting to make a bad decision or a stupid mistake.

Appreciate reading the dialog between you and Cmaier above.

Is the new computer also going to be a Mac as well? If so you could just use Time Machine, otherwise if it's between a Mac and PC you can always just save off all your files and then reinstall whatever programs needed.

Another option here, if you were to get a NAS, would be to put in place beforehand and then put all your files on it, then when you setup the new computer just hook up to it and have them all available to you. This is safe and secure solution.