Does anyone have experience with building a NAS for their Mac?
Does anyone have experience with building a NAS for their Mac?
I’m really looking into building a NAS for my Mac. I got the 256gb MacBook Air and currently back up the machine using a nvme drive over type c but having to plug it in to access video files and backup every couple days is not ideal. With how cheap physical storage is now, a NAS seems like a good solution. Does anyone have a NAS at home and can share the software and hardware needed to make it run smoothly?
I use a Synology DS920+ And have been very happy with it. I have time machine running for several MacBooks. I also use it as a Jellyfin server.
The Synology setup is easy and it is smooth to add new drives. Just remember to add the smallest drives first. If you have two 4 tb drives setup, don’t buy a 2tb drive to add more space, but going up to an 8 is no problem.
We have a couple of Synology NAS at the office (I forget the models). One is geared towards data sharing on the LAN and the other is used by our off-site employees. We managed to get a git server running which is nice, but that's an interesting idea to use them for Time Machine. As it stands, we just issue everyone a personal TM external drive and call it a day, but I might look into this.
It was pretty easy to set up. There was a time machine setting somewhere that makes it so the Mac will just see it as a viable backup location.
Having everyone’s TM on the NAS would make it easy to set up some sort of offsite mirror as well.
I just googled Synology Time Machine setup or something and there were a ton of guides.
+1. Have same setup.
I use unraid and used it for Time Machine back ups.
I also use it for smb shares. For captureone libraries and apps, like renpy games
Start with 2 8tb wd red they’re 122$ on Amazon right now. One parity and one data. You’ll have 8 tb to use.
Then pick up and eBay pc 8th gen or more from dell or Lenovo or hp for about 200. 8th get i5 allows a good plex setup for media sharing
Best Buy also has easily shuckable 14TB and 18TB EasyStore WD Reds for $200 and $250 right now.
Be careful buying drive you intend to shuck for a NAS. It is hard to tell if they are SMR or not, and if they are the NAS will throw errors from time to time. I would say if you already have the drives go ahead and try it out, but if you are buying new, get some that are designed for a NAS.
I believe this fits two drive you can expand it more if you transplant to a new case and psu. I’m at 8 drives
I forgot to add you can add drives of different sizes and just keep adding it down the road i gave a mix of 3,4, 6 and 8 tb drives over the years as they got cheaper
I had a home built NAS running first FreeNAS and then Ubuntu, but eventually switched to a Synology which I am very happy with. Saturates my 10gb network and is super easy to manage and set up stuff like network time machine volumes.
The easy thing is to get a NAS like Synology or Terramaster. You can definitely build one from tutorials online, but I’m at a stage in life where I don’t have the time.
I have set one up for Time Machine in the past, but have switched to CCC direct to the NAS.
Haha, you’re not the only one.
If you want something more turn-key, go for a Synology box. Go for something with at least 2 drives like a DS220j for less than $200 or the slightly better DS223 for about $250. Just pop whatever drives you want in there, I’d suggest server-grade, NAS drives or SSD for better reliability. Setting this up to work with Time Machine is very easy and there are tons of walkthroughs online for setting that up.
For a more DIY approach, you can build a TrueNAS box (formerly FreeNAS). Tons of tutorials you can follow online that will tell you everything you need to go this route.
One thing to note, a NAS will only be available on your home network without additional configuration. TailScale is my recommendation if this is something you want to do.
My router has a USB port and supports time machine backups over Wi-Fi. I just connected an external hard drive and it works very well. It ended up being the easiest solution for me without needing to invest in a whole NAS.
If you aren’t already, you may want to use a solid state external drive or be sure that your router it allows the hard drive the sleep. I killed 3 external drives by doing this before I realized what the issue was.
I did notice that it wasn’t sleeping properly, so I just SSH in and kill the offending process as needed. The issue only comes back following a restart, but otherwise the HDD works great. The disk is asleep unless I am actively backing up or using it.
I also have an offline external SSD I use as a redundant backup to be safe.
Some good options here. I’m a fan of TrueNAS from iX Systems. Very easy to build your own but I’ll admit my last box I just bought their mini and put in my own disks.
I’d avoid QNAP although they’ll do the job.