Home backup/file storage on your home networks and your network itself

[DrBeaker]

Just wondered what everyone does for home backup/file storage on your home networks and your network itself?

 

I'm looking to modernise or centralise mine to make it a bit easier to manage - from a file and networks point of view. Bear in mind I'm sure we all get enough of this at work!

 

Do you have a NAS at home?

If so where do you keep it - living room, cupboard, garage etc?

Have you run any extra cabling for wired network connections?

Anyone moved to PoE access points and a central location for your broadband etc?

 

Do you use the NAS for centralised storage for your files e.g. as a file server or as a central backup for your 'client' computers?

 

Ideally this is what I was thinking:

• Getting Virgin to run the fibre/coax to the garage, use their router in modem mode.
  
• 1Gbps main/core switch with some PoE ports OR PoE Injectors
  
• PoE access points - 1x upstairs, 1x downstairs.
  
• NAS in the garage
  
• wireless clients/run some ethernet cabling to key locations
  

 

Maybe this is a pipe dream but just thinking from a way to make things easier. Weirdly enough every other tech I know just uses the default router from their ISP so I must be the odd one out.

 

What are everyone's thoughts?

[ITGURU]

Downstairs at main phone socket I have BT infinity router and a switch to feed downstairs poe cctv. uplink cable from downstairs to upstairs to study where i have a server and nas connected to another Poe switch for WiFi. all files are backed up to 2 external drives. all running 1 gig. 1 ubiquiti ap ceiling mounted upstairs gets me good signal throughout the house. switched off the BT wireless. Edited January 21, 2019 by ITGURU

[mikeprice]

I/we have 2 laptops on wifi - and everything else is wired - the stuff upstairs - TiVo box, telly desktop and raspberry pi - are all connected via Powerline

 

 

For backup - I connect a portable hard drive every few months - no actual valuable data is held on hard drives - it is all on Google Drive/OneDrive

 

Or in some cases on multiple flash devices or DVDs

 

In the cases of a laptop getting stupidly slow or causing problems - I just re-install Windows plus whatever other stuff I still need

[Sibrows]

Currently: BT FTTC connection into the house dumped the home hub and replaced with Ubiquiti USG and DrayTek Vigor 130 modem - the BT home hub even with WiFi disabled would on occasion refuse to serve some clients and never consistently the same thing!

Ubiquiti Nano - currently balanced on a shelf waiting for wiring to get up to the loft to mount it on the ceiling upstairs.

Most items wirelessly connected with the exception of TV in living room, MacMini acting as a media centre with external HDDs hung off it for backup etc & RaspberryPi running HomeAssistant.

 

Plan: Shortly to have the back of the garage turned into downstairs toilet and utility room. Plan to relocate the router and most of the gear into the over-head space above the (shortly to be built) downstairs toilet, as the headspace will allow for a false ceiling and then an area 2.4m long 1m wide and around 0.9m high. At the same point run cat6 to certain key points around the house; living room TV, office, spare data cabling pulled for the bedrooms.

 

Would eventually like to get some form of 'proper NAS' but at the moment a pair of 8TB external HDDs mirrored will have to do. Backups of my laptop happen at home as mentioned above and an other disk on my desk at work to act as the offsite backup.

[Danp]

I moved my master socket so it comes into the house by my TV in the sitting room. My router lives there, a HP Microserver (with decent graphics card, hdmi to tv for netflix etc), my Raspberry Pi Hole, another Raspberry Pi running OpenMediaVault. Most of our data is on the Microserver (2 x 4tb and 2 x 2tb) and I have a copy of the important stuff on OpenMediaVault drives which I remove and put elsewhere in the house and sometimes I keep a disk at work (not connected to anything, just an offsite backup).

[Andycat]

Synology NAS (212, pretty old but fine) in my AV cupboard under TV. ALll families home drives, plus music and video libraries on it. 3 PC's, 2 TV's, 2 Yamaha amps all hard wired, everything else wifi on Sky Q router and TP link Archer Access Point, with 1gb switches dotted around!

[jthompson]

HP Microserver alongside the router/switch in the hall. Also have an older QNAP 2-bay NAS there for periodic backup of data from the Microserver, but the NAS is only ever powered up to run a backup. Mainly using the Microserver as a Plex server tbh, but that also includes our photo albums. Thinking of looking at Amazon Glacier as a backup for whatever data we hold at home (i.e. hopefully never have to do a restore, but if we do, not being able to do it instantly or very quickly should be okay). I'd also like to get a UPS for the networking, server and NAS.

[HPlum78]

I have just upgraded from a little two disk NAS box that was essentially a snot of disk if I am honest to a QNAP TS-453B with 4x ironwolf 6tb disks and upgraded the ram to 16gb got one of their PCIe M2 dual SSD expansion cards along with 2 WD 1gb M2 SSD cards for cache/ tiering. Good box moved my server VMs on to it and my many many many tb of movies/ TV shows and backups, only regret is that i should have gone with more ram...

[Jcx500]

Ive got a DL360 G8 running as my file server, then i backup via windows backup

[Sonic007]

If you are using the Virgin router in modem only mode are you using switches with built in router or a separate router?

 

If you are planning on having important stuff on your backup NAS in the garage then I hope your garage is secure.

 

I reccommend the Synology NAS devices. Very good and offers so much more such as adding your IP cameras, Media Server, etc.

 

What NAS are you looking at? How many drives? RAID?

[Davit2005]

NAS with Shares and a few VMs with backups to Cloud or Rotated HDD's off site

 

APs, CCTV and IP Phones all PoE with wired connections.

 

One Primary Server location and one secondary. Primary Server location is where the DSL modem is located, whilst the secondary

has a 4G router for backup. Each location has its own UPS, each UPS is on a different Electric Ring. Ditched the ISP modem in favour of a DrayTek as the ISP modem could not route IPv6 to Internal vlans.

 

Running dual AD, DNS, email and Firewall servers with the firewalls running in HA pair.

 

2 X 1Gb Edgeswitches and 2 X 10Gb Switches, the 10Gb switches have resilient links to each edgeswitch and each VMWare host. Using

Multiple Spanning Tree to prevent loops between switches whilst the hosts sort it out for themselves.

 

Setup with complete resilency in mind although only certain critical traffic is allowed over the 4G Backup to conserve data allowance.

 

All in power consumtion around 300watts not including the desktop which is only running when gaming or doing specific lab work. The desktop

is connected direct to one of the 10Gb switches over fibre and can be tagged for specific vlans for labs.

 

Overkill a bit, but do not have many issues. I just cannot be bothered to run a LAB like a production network. Maybe in ten years I'd of ditched the lot for a hobby not involving IT at all :-) .

Edited January 22, 2019 by Davit2005

[howartp]

Lucky to have a sizable study as it's an old granny-flat built onto the side of the house 40+ years ago.

Virgin-Media superhub in Modem mode, with Asus R100 (?) router in front of it, and a Ubiquiti AP wired to centre of house for wifi

Almost "Headless" Windows 7 PC serving as file/print server plus Antispam and intranet etc (for testing pre-upload to church website)

Wired to most PC locations and SkyQ.

Acronis TrueImage backup to cloud nightly/weekly.

[rich_tech]

I have photos backed up to iCloud, wife and I both pay 79p a month for the 50GB storage option there, on top of that I have basic Office365 for Business on one of my domains(was handy as a training aid on a few technologies over the years), so one drive for business is included in that with 1TB of storage for £5 or thereabouts a month. Also have a fair few GB kicking around on various free storage platforms (Hubic, Box, DropBox)

 

I also have a 3TB WD NAS in the house, which doesn't host anything "Important" other than music collections from MP3s, which gets backed up to a portable drive about once a year (not much gets added to it, seeing as most games download now over the web when you reinstall) though streaming has taken over the mp3 playing these days.

Edited January 22, 2019 by rich_tech