NAS for a small nonprofit

skiierguy said:

• We have a second facility around the corner that needs a similar tech makeover. It's beyond the range of WiFi, so it has its own network. Can we use a single NAS for both? If so, would that handle cameras at both properties?

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Using a single NAS for both sets of cameras is (probably) only going to work well if you can get them all on the same network. You can probably use something similar to OwnCloud for file sharing, but for the camera's it's really going to depend on how they expect to offload footage.

You might be better off setting up a NAS at each site. Bonus: They'll also be able to use each other as offsite backups.

Here's the thing though: Unless you're planning to be around for a long time, you need to be able to hand off maintenance and expansion/replacement of whatever you build to someone else. Assuming this is a proper 501(c) nonprofit organization (or the local equivalent, if non-US), there is often fairly favorable pricing for cloud-based solutions. That leaves you with a much lower administrative overhead and saves on on-prem hardware costs. It's certainly worth running the numbers on.

There's also companies like TechSoup that can help you get hardware, software, and services.

If cost is a concern, a repurposed desktop containing those 2TB drives in a RAIDz array running Nextcloud would be a good choice. Nextcloud is fairly simple to set up, robust, does data storage really well, is a good backup target and can also be used for other purposes down the road if they find a need for it.

Edit: also, if the two buildings are currently linked, you can use a single NAS for both. Network bandwidth would be a concern, but as long as they're linked by at least a 100Mb link it should be fine.

I use Nextcloud and it's fairly unequalled, but it's not a transparent Windows backup like other solutions, and the security cameras are unlikely to play ball with it directly.

Otherwise, I'm just ++ Ardax.

Nextcloud works well as a backup target for Windows Backup, and if they can get by with using the free version of Veeam it works even better.

If these are two separate locations. As in each place has their own connection to the internet. Given you say they far enough without WIFI which also probably means they aren't networked to begin with. Buy/build 2 NAS's. Preferably the same platform/Brand and have them back each other up remotely.

Do note if you wish to use the NAS as a security camera storage target. The drives it writes to will have heavy wear on them really really fast.
So if you get a 4 bay NAS. You might dedicate 2/3 drives to a raid array and 1 as security camera only drive. And if the 1 drive dies then oh well replace it. You don't want to wear out your important data drives. And the 2nd site just needs a 2-bay system with no raid. As i'm saying that each site syncs a backup to each other.

UserIDAlreadyInUse said:

Nextcloud works well as a backup target for Windows Backup, and if they can get by with using the free version of Veeam it works even better.

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How are you doing this? Targetting the backup to the synchronized directory? Does that work well? And doesn't that waste a lot of space? (You're essentially keeping a backup in the computer?)

When I used Windows Backup to TrueNAS, I just backed it up to a CIFS share. Heavy on space but they were just DR backups, not meant for long-term retrieval. We did a redirect of Documents to another share on the NAS for storage. When we used Veeam, I set up an iSCSI target and mounted that on the Veeam server as the vault. That worked better thanks to Veeam's deduplication.

The hardware is the easy part, it's the configuring/maintaining the system that is the hard part.

I recommend you buy

Synology 1-Bay DiskStation DS124 (Diskless)​

It's $175 on amazon. You can have it in your hands in a couple of days.

Put in your 2TB disk in there and see if all the software features work as you expect. You can always upgrade to a bigger synology later.

For any kind of camera video system, the hard part is vieiwing/reviewing/searching the videos on demand, see if the in-built "surveillance station" works for your users and how it compares to your existing software.

UserIDAlreadyInUse said:

When I used Windows Backup to TrueNAS, I just backed it up to a CIFS share. Heavy on space but they were just DR backups, not meant for long-term retrieval. We did a redirect of Documents to another share on the NAS for storage. When we used Veeam, I set up an iSCSI target and mounted that on the Veeam server as the vault. That worked better thanks to Veeam's deduplication.

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Ah, OK, so no Nextcloud involved? (Or maybe you were using external storage with Nextcloud.) I was curious about backing up to Nextcloud.

I apologize! I was using TrueNAS as the backend for Nextcloud, and conflated the two of them. No, I was using Nextcloud as the file storage and TrueNAS as the backup target on the same box. Sorry for the confusion, been a long year so far.

chalex said:

The hardware is the easy part, it's the configuring/maintaining the system that is the hard part.

I recommend you buy

Synology 1-Bay DiskStation DS124 (Diskless)​

It's $175 on amazon. You can have it in your hands in a couple of days.

Put in your 2TB disk in there and see if all the software features work as you expect. You can always upgrade to a bigger synology later.

For any kind of camera video system, the hard part is vieiwing/reviewing/searching the videos on demand, see if the in-built "surveillance station" works for your users and how it compares to your existing software.

Click to expand...

Maybe with a 2-Bay to start, for drive failure redundancy?

Sure, I think they need to work through the details of whether this is going to be just "backups" of other systems or the primary data copy. And if it's the primary data copy then they may want backups of that somewhere else.

I've been using a Synology 2-bay for about three years. It works fine, except for recently Windows 11 has been giving me hiccups. My windows 10 box continues to work with it.

I purchased a Synology 2 bay NAS DiskStation DS720+ (Diskless) and bought 2x Iron Wolf Pro's 18 TB for it. I also bought aftermarket RAM to max it out. I ran both read and write NMVe SSDs for awhile, Seagate NVMes. However, the write SSD cache kept throwing errors. I eventually converted them both to read cache.