We Want Simple NAS for Replication Only

To protect data for small businesses and home users, what do we want? We have no interest to backup on an external HDD connected to our PC because there is no protection in case of theft, fire, deluge or big disasters like that in our office or at home. We want replication in another site.

We have tested several NAS to do that, but were always disappointed. These small units have too much functionalities. We don’t need to manage pictures or movies with all their Codecs, UPnP/DLNA and all these multimedia stuffs, we don’t need to connect cameras for video-surveillance. We don’t need wireless or iSCSI support, to share printers. No.

We just wish a simple, affordable and secure product to have our data regularly copied outside on a NAS connected to Ethernet and being installed at home for a managing director or by a friend for a CE user – in exchange, we can offer him to have his own NAS in our office to replicate his data.

Small businesses rarely use more than 1TB. So we need a NAS with two 1TB mirrored and removable HDDs.

Here the main problem is Ethernet with a speed much to slow for the first copy of all our data. But we will frankly accept to make the first total backup – and a backup image to have the possibility to eventually reboot from one of the NAS’ drives – in the office and than carry the HDD where the NAS is implemented. It will just cost us two tickets of a tram or a subway. In case of disaster, we are also ready to buy two more tickets to transport one of the two HDDs being outside and to put it in our PC and to replace the failing internal drive of our computer.

Here we need an excellent – but really easy to use – backup software able to move frequently and rapidly only the files that we have changed to get them finally in native format on the NAS. All the technologies are already here to do that:

• CDP
• compression
• post-process byte-level de-dupe of backup data with complete reconstruction on the NAS

CDP is cheap and, as an example, Apple is offering it for free. Also free of charge, compression reduced the amount of data (by only around two) and get good results with business data (not with audio and AV files). De-dupe is a key point to reduce the transfer of backup data. The ratio can be as high as 50. Today it’s mostly used with very expansive appliances or costly software solutions. Why not using Opendedup, an open source software released recently for Linux? Oracle’s Solaris ZFS is another open-source file system option as well as BackupPC for Linux machines.

In term of security, we want absolutely encryption using the standard way (login and password) and we don’t want to be obliged to go through the Web site of the NAS manufacturer to accomplish the transfer of our confidential data.

When we travel, we also require to have access to the NAS from anywhere through an IP address.

We know that we will be obliged to always power the NAS but the disks must be in idle mode when the storage subsystem is not used for a period of time.

And we suggest a price in the range of $300 to $400 for the NAS and the software, an amount that’s possible to reach when you know that a 1TB SATA 3.5-inch drive costs only €50. Not in the $1,000s range of some products with the same functions.

Why this kind of product is not offered as all the technologies exist to design it? It’s just a question of marketing’s approach: the NAS manufacturers have not understood that that there was a huge demand of home users and SMBs for such a replication device, not for a product doing it all but doing poor backuping.