I’ve been waiting a couple of years to write this post. In November, 2015, I bought a Synology RS815 NAS appliance to replace the DIY solution that I had been using for years before that. A month ago, that NAS appliance turned ten years old. It’s been in daily use for the past decade. At the six year mark, I replaced the hard drives in this first NAS appliance. Reading in Reddit forums and elsewhere, a number of people have reported getting 10–12 years out of their Synology NAS products. So, I’m not the only one and this seems to be fairly common. That being said, that ten year old device can be a bit slow when it is running rsync jobs, virus scan jobs, and doing a backup of my laptop all at the same time — I try to stagger those activities throughout the day / week.
Since 2015, I’ve bought two additional Synology NAS appliances: 2X RS822RP+ NAS appliance model. The ten year old appliance continues to serve as the primary and the two additional units serve as backups. Each one is in a geographically separate area (US west coast, US Midwest, somewhere outside the US). I maintain a server rack that houses each of these units — a total of three server racks.
Once a year (or so), I visit each of these locations to perform basic maintenance. I have a resource at each location that can power cycle a device or type a command on a console if needed.
Each day, the primary NAS appliance runs several jobs that replicate data (via rsync) to the backup appliances over the site-to-site VPN connections.
Each server rack has:
- Synology NAS filer (see above)
- UPS dedicated to the NAS filer.
- CyberPower UPS for all of the other equipment.
- CyberPower PDU (to keep the wiring organized)
- pfSense+ running on Protectli hardware acting as a central router.
- 2X ethernet switches.
- pfSense+ running on Protectli hardware acting as a firewall + VPN router.
- A couple of Dell PowerEdge R720s servers for various projects.
- Terminal Server to access the various equipment if something goes wrong.
- External battery backup (Ecoflow batteries) for extended power outages.
The pfSense VPN router maintains site-to-site VPN connections between each site (server rack). This allows the NAS appliances to communicate with each other for data replication purposes.
Two of the sites have a remote access VPN setup that I can connect to with my phone, laptop, etc. The third location is in a remote location and relies upon Starlink for internet connectivity. You don’t have a static IP or even the ability to do some type of port forwarding into a device hooked up through Starlink; so, for that site, I rely upon the VPN router connecting to the other sites and connectivity being allowed to the admin interfaces over the VPN connection.
Once a week, I let an rsync job update the backup of my laptop on the primary NAS appliance. All data on the NAS appliance is synced to the two backup NAS appliances each night. All three NAS appliances have 20TB external hard drives attached via USB port. Daily snapshots are created on each appliance. Those snapshots are kept for 90 days.
I, also, have a couple of Power-Over-Ethernet IP cameras watching each server rack. Each of those writes the video data to the Synology Surveillance Station software on the NAS appliances.
If it hasn’t become obvious yet, I do not like using the public cloud for storing my personal or business data. So, I do this instead. It’s a hobby. Gotta keep up with patching.