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SOLVED NAS and power outages; recommendations

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olegsomphane

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Joined
Dec 6, 2008
I was looking to set up a network drive to back up my computers at home. I was wondering what would happen to a nas drive during a power outage. Is data loss likely? Does it matter whether or not the drive is active or idling? Can anyone recommend a good nas solution for this purpose?
 
If there's nothing being written to the drives you should be fine.

I've accidentally knocked the power lead out of mine a few times and no loss.

Remembering of course : they're essentially small computers just sending and receiving files.
 
For $50 you can usually get a 350w APC UPS from OfficeDepot or the like, well worth the investment. I would guess some NAS's might support USB connection to the APC so they can shut themselves down gracefully if the UPS battery wears down
 
olegsomphane said:
I was looking to set up a network drive to back up my computers at home. I was wondering what would happen to a nas drive during a power outage. Is data loss likely? Does it matter whether or not the drive is active or idling? Can anyone recommend a good nas solution for this purpose?
Click to expand...
The answer depends on what operating system and what kind of file system you are using on the drives. In addition, if you are writing data to the disks. Technically speaking, if there are no writes being done at all, no data should be corrupted. A UPS that can shut down the computer gracefully should prevent this problem.
 
Hmm... I have been planning to use NTFS with Windows/Linux... possibly ext4/btrfs at some point later.

Am I better off buying a low profile server and hooking it up with a ups or is a dedicated all-in-one better/cheaper?
 
We can't decide if it is "better off" for you. For purely file sharing purposes, the two options you listed are basically the same. It comes down to whether you want to have more control over the system or have a company pre-built one. The latter offers very little flexibility when you want to upgrade the hardware, so be sure to keep the future in mind. Building your own leaves the option of running other services on the system, allowing you to offload current service to that computer or to add new ones to the network. Again, that depends on what you want.
 
Thanks, after some more searching on the forums I have decided to build a 4 drive mini computer and load ubuntu or freenas on it... I decided I want futureproofing and control more :)
 
Glad you came to a decision. It can be daunting to build a server.
 
I would stick with an APC unit. I've had far better experiences with them.
 
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