We're about to buy our first NAS and I have some questions about how to make it suit our needs. Let me describe our current setup, what's wrong with it, and how we'd like to move to the future.
My wife and and I are avid photographers. We both have well over 500GB of photos. Most of which are, of course, junk, and should be deleted, but that takes time. And of course there are family memories in there that are precious.
We both have MacBook Pro's with 500GB SSD and 1TB hard drives in them. These machines are 5-6 years old and really starting to show their age. Replacing them is on the horizon but we can't, getting that kind of disk space into a MacBook Pro, especially for things you don't need, is prohibitively expensive.
We have a very good back up system at home and don't want to compromise data reliability. We have 2 airport express base stations, one with a 5 TB drive that runs a time machine backup for both our laptops, and one with two 3TB drives, one for my laptop, one for hers. These 3TB drives rotate out approximately monthly to a safe deposit box. So we have hit the trifecta of data back. 1) a copy on our machine, 2) a copy backed up locally (actually 2 copies but that's ok), and 3) an off site copy.
If we do some data management we should be able to take our personal data and divide it up into "stuff we need on our laptop" and stuff that can live on the Synology. Assume that that is done.
So the question is, how do we keep the backup trifecta in place? Here's what I'm thinking:
A NAS running Raid 5 with 3 drives, single time machine running the 5TB drive.
The single time machine backs up our laptops, preserving our "in use" data. So that covers #1 and #2 for in use data.
We also use Time Machine to backup our laptops to the Synology.
And then here's the part I don't truly understand. Approximately monthly, we pull a single drive out of the synology and take it to the safe deposit box. We bring last month's drive back. Format it, and install it in the NAS.
The NAS realizes that one of its RAID drives has failed and starts doing its recovery, using the new, blank drive. Once it is done we are back to our normal level of performance.
And of course if the house burns down, we still have the single drive from the RAID5 in the bank safe deposit box.
(Note, I barely understand the RAID5 vs 6 and perhaps 6 is what I need here, and I bring 2 drives to the bank for off site storage.)
It's a long opening but yes, there is a question in here. Will a RAID 5 let me pull a disk, or a RAID 6, or reading the comments, a RAID 10? From reading the comments a RAID5 will not work, but it sounds like a RAID 10.
This also sounds like I'm "abusing" the RAID system to get a local backup and an off-site backup. What's a better solution? (And please don't say cloud...)