I'm in the market for a expandable data backup solution. Some things I'm considering are:
- Drobo (S) (which don't ethernet connections)
- Drobo FS (which does have ethernet)
- Promise Pegasus RAID (which Apple tries to sell with newer macs)
- Synology products (which do have ethernet)
Before I can make a decision, I need to have a better understanding of what the advantages are of buying dedicated NAS vs attaching devices to my AirPort Extreme. I mostly plan on using this for:
- offloading large data (photo collection, videos, music) since I'm going to get a smaller SSD for my laptop
- Time Machine backups
- A big plus would be the ability to access any file from anywhere. i.e. - I'm on the go and really want to fetch some photo album or music.
Here are my thoughts and understanding, so you can help by correcting me:
- For offloading data and time machine backups, any of these solutions will work. The advantage of NAS (or even connecting DAS to AirPort) will be that I can do these backups and accesses over the air while I'm at home, and not have to "dock".
- I'm not even sure I can attach the Pegasus drives to the AirPort because of the thunderbolt cable. Maybe if the pegasus is attached to the thunderbolt display and that is attached to the AirPort it will work? But if I do that, I'm paying for thunderbolt i/o speed and then bottlenecking it with the ethernet cable.
- If I want to access files from anywhere, it seems like the AirPort may not work unless I have a dedicated computer at home as a server (which I don't... I'll only have my laptop which will be with me on the go). So I probably do need dedicated NAS? I also read I probably need to set up VPN and dynamic DNS... something that I am not sure how to do. So if you can give me insight into this and talk about which of the above products are conducive to this type of use case, that would be great. Is it hard to set up?