Setting Up a Home NAS and a Backup That Survives a Fire
Disks, shares, snapshots and the off-site copy that actually saves your photos. RAID is not a backup.
A home NAS earns its cost twice: as storage everyone in the house can reach, and as the centre of a backup that does not depend on one drive behaving. The setup matters more than the box.
Decide what deserves protection
- Photos and video you cannot re-shoot.
- Documents, invoices, tax records, licence files and product keys.
- Work projects and client material.
- Configuration exports: browser profiles, password vault exports, game saves, server configs.
- Anything that would take a day or more to recreate belongs on the list; games and installers mostly do not.
Choose hardware without regret
Two bays and two drives in a mirrored array is the sane home minimum: one disk can die without an outage. Use CMR drives rather than SMR for NAS work, and treat RAID as availability, not backup. A six-bay unit with a single disk inside is worse than a two-bay unit with a mirrored pair and one external copy.
Configure it properly once
- Install the disks, create the array, then create a shared folder per purpose rather than one giant share.
- Disable or rename the default administrator account, and give every person their own login with access only to what they need.
- Turn on scheduled snapshots. They are the undo button for accidental deletion and ransomware-looking changes.
- Attach a USB drive and set a weekly copy job to it.
- Add a UPS. An unplanned power cut during an array rebuild is how file systems die.
- Serve it over Ethernet, and never forward file-sharing ports to the internet. Use the unit's own VPN for remote access.
Close the 3-2-1 loop on the Windows side
Three copies, two kinds of media, one off-site. Map the NAS as a network drive and point File History at it, and keep an image-level backup of the system disk with a tool such as Macrium Reflect X, Acronis True Image or AOMEI Backupper, so a broken Windows install is a restore instead of an evening of work. Then keep one encrypted copy of the important folders on a drive that lives somewhere else, or in cloud storage.
Finally, test a restore: copy a folder back, mount the image, open a file from a snapshot. A backup nobody has restored is a hypothesis, not a backup.