Multiple NAS for Home use and remote sync

The new NAS would serve the same purposes, plus:
– I foresee the number of photos growing much faster soon due to personal circumstances
– I’ll add syncing of some cloud-based storage (Dropbox, google drive e.g. I have a holiday photo–shares with friends & family, in addition to personal)
– sharing photos from the NAS to others, so they can download them at their leisure.
– might store some terrestrial TV/PVR files (via Kodi) there when I’m storing up a season to binge-watch in the winter (though the old NAS will probably be used for that, reconfigured to RAID 0 as I’m not precious wrt the TV files!)
Not planning to run VMs etc (though wouldn’t rule out one in future — but it would not be a workhorse, just a playground). No transcoding of video, no website hosting etc. No surveillance usage anticipated at this time.

Initial backup strategy — either update via USB3 to external drive as today, or perhaps have a spare internal drive stashed away from home, then swap one of the raids mirrors out on a regular basis and let it rebuild the mirror, whilst the up-to-date mirror goes offsite.

Longer-term plan: convince my (somewhat technophobe) family they need to store offsite too, get a NAS at e.g. my parents’ place and/or at my brother’s and then cross-backup over the internet. They are unlikely to leave it on all the time, i.e. there will be times not all ‘nodes’ are reachable.

Given the above – some questions/validations before taking the plunge, as ultimately it may involve multiple machines:
– I’m thinking Synology as it will be more user-friendly if I convince the family — WD software seems rather limiting (though cheaper NAS) and QNAP not so user-oriented/friendly;
– I’m thinking a DS218+ with 2x3TB or 2x4TB should be enough for now, and 4TB seems the price/TB sweet-spot for WD Red at the moment. I could probably stretch to DS718+ though not convinced it’s worth the extra given my workloads. Would you agree?
– is the initial backup strategy workable in your experience, i.e. swapping out internal drives & stashing the spare offsite?
– presumably dissimilar models of Synology NAS sync over the internet fine (e.g. a DS119 at my parents, DS218 at my brother, & DS718 at mine), but mixing/matching brands will not work (other than via 3rd party cloud like dropbox)?
– is the Synology software robust enough to cope with not all NAS (local vs remote) being available all the time?
– if I get NAS-over-internet-to-NAS syncing going, can I secure the files on the remote end? i.e. I don’t want to pry into my parents’/brother’s affairs when synced to my NAS, likewise vice-versa on my data stored at their homes.

DS718+ indeed would be more than you need. You could easily get away with a DS218 (DS218+ if you plan to experiment with VM in the future) and a DS218j or even ds119j at the remote location. If your old NAS support rsync – you could use that for an offsite backup. It is easier to set up if you choose the same brand, but it also can be done with mixed NAS brands.

Swapping drives would not be a great way of doing offsite backup. It would work, but drives probably would not last as long as they would. You can simply get a USB pocket drive and set it up for automatic backup once it’s connected to the NAS. This drive can then be taken to a remote location.

If you can not trust your offsite backup, you can back your main NAS also to the cloud. You can use Synology C2 cloud, Google, Dropbox or BlackBlaze (or many other providers).

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