Is the DS920+ right for me?

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Is the DS920+ right for me?

21
3
NAS
DLINK :( (OUT) Shiny new DS920+ in.. :)
Operating system
  1. Windows
Mobile operating system
  1. Android
I currently have a DLINK DNS340L which was never great with poor support. Bought cheaply and paid the price.

Originally looked at the 420j videos and thought 1GB fixed was not enough so moved on up to the
DS420+ but the DS920+ is not that much more in a local shop.

Mainly for home media use.

But i would like some important files to have a copy on each drive where I can plug
in an external USB drive and backup easily. Is that an option?
No need to backup all the media, it would be easy to replace those with a little time.


A feature i would like is something similar to the onedrive or google docs where someone can
have their own access to their own folder to backup pictures mainly. Take a photo and have the
option to upload it to the NAS but not having access to everyone elses files.

If this is possible is it as easy as adding a one drive style app to the phone?


Similar with media, is it possible to have several plex users without giving them access
to the entire media folder/network? Would this require several plex accounts or can
this be setup ina single account?

I may have many more questions, PLEX did not work properly with the DLINK, always showed
the device as offline even though you could sometimes view the files.

Thank you in advance.

Dave (from the UK)
 
I don't know you experience level, but I was a completely newbie at this when I got my 918+. It takes far more manual setup than I expected to get it to do what I want, but the guys on this forum are very helpful. I'm very happy with mine, but it isn't as simple as just adding an app.
 
Hey,
Yeah, some of the Synology apps and settings should cover what you need (and there are more advanced options with Docker) .
Also the 420+ may be enough for you now, but if price difference is something you can swallow, why not?
For example Synology Drive and Moments have features kind of resembling Onedrive and Google photos. (not everyone is a fan of these, so YMMV)
Plex works great and users don't even need to have any account on the NAS itself to use it.
With a Plex pass (highly recommended) you can have managed users, PIN codes, dvr and gpu transcoding...

To be honest I would suggest figuring out the hardware you'd like to put together and once you have it, going through the setup process, functions, accounts, security!!!, access levels, firewall, backup, etc, etc. before you start setting up any user facing services.
The interface and options might take some time getting used to and the (proper) initial setup of everything will definitely take a while , but the features are well worth it.
I'm already doing five times as many things on mine I thought I would.
 
Is there an option or feature that can copy one folder/sub folders to each drive?
I don't need RAID for the media but files like pictures i want to keep as safe as
possible. One copy on each drive that i can backup later would be ideal.

ie. Save new files to drive 1 and the system detects changes and copies them to
drive 2 and 3 etc. I backup once a week/month from the main folder.

Losing less space than using RAID?


Option for family members to backup their photo's from their phones but keeping
them private? Some are not tech savvy so the easier the better.

Had a look at the reviews for the Drive and Moments, and DS cloud also. Not inspiring.


Any other options for phone picture backups?

Thanks
 
DS420+ but the DS920+ is not that much more in a local shop.
If you are already looking at 420+ then go for 920+ don't even think about it. More future proof and more powerful.

@Blex already said it all, so follow his advice.

Save new files to drive 1 and the system detects changes and copies them to
drive 2 and 3 etc. I backup once a week/month from the main folder.
Yes, you can do this with Sync folder feature. Just keep in mind that running multiple basic (non-raid) drives, if they fail you lose it all, so backup should be spot on for things that matter.

Option for family members to backup their photo's from their phones but keeping
them private? Some are not tech savvy so the easier the better.
As long as they are running as separate DSM accounts they will not see each others content.

Had a look at the reviews for the Drive and Moments, and DS cloud also. Not inspiring.
It depends on what you expect from the apps/services.

Any other options for phone picture backups?
Personally, I use Acronis True Image mobile - Acronis True Image Mobile - on-premise backup for your mobile device
 
A drive layout question. If i did use SHR or similar how would it work if I had 3 8TB drives and a 6TB drive?
Would it reduce the 8TB down to 6TB usable?

Seems i forgot to post this Q?. Forum saved it though thats nice..


Phone backups, i was thinking of onedrive's feature where someone takes a picture and it gets uploaded to one drive as well as saved to the phone. Would be great if that could save to my NAS rather than onedrive.
Family spread around so not local.


Yes considering not using RAID, only a small amount of data is important, media can be ripped again, so not a great loss. Time consuming maybe. Photo's and old personal videos will get backed up to an external device but would like these to be on every drive also.

Almost lost a load many years ago. Upgraded to a new 1TB drive and cut/pasted all old photo's to that drive thinking its new and going to be reliable. Soon after putting all the data on it the drive failed....

Had to do a long tedious data recovery and even build an old pc back up that had several drives in raid to recover the lost data. :(
Learned my lesson on that one... Data must be in several locations and drives.


Thanks again.
 
For simplicity sake, go for an shr with 4 same size drives.
You can achieve 3-2-1 backup with an external drive and cloud (Hyper Backup with Synology C3 or Backbaze B2) for important stuff.
I suggested Synology Drive and Moments because they are easiest to set up to be used remotely through quickconnect (no opening of ports required but may not be that reliable and also slower than a direct connection). I'm only using Moments on my mobiles, not DS Cloud or Drive.
I recently migrated 15k photos of 40GB from Google Photos and set up continuous backup on both Android and iOS. 99% worked, 1% have messed up dates (even after updating exif data from the .json files). Zipped up the 3 albums affected, waiting for Synology Photos in DSM7 to maybe solve this.

Acronis True Image Mobile is unfortunately not (yet?) available on the 920+ 😞
There's also Nextcloud, but would be much more complicated to set up imho.
Or maybe you could use something like FolderSync and set up WebDav server.
There are probably another 100 ways to do this though.
 
Acronis True Image Mobile is unfortunately not (yet?) available on the 920+
You can get it via VDSM

There's also Nextcloud, but would be much more complicated to set up imho.
Docker. Pretty easy

If i did use SHR or similar how would it work if I had 3 8TB drives and a 6TB drive?

One 8TB would be used for redundacy
 
Excellent RAID Calculator. Simple enough for me even... :) I was expecting the RAID 5 figures with 6TB of wasted space.

Using SHR 2 x 8TB and the 3rd 8TB used for protection, adding the 6TB gives me the full 6TB worth of data. Thats cool i was expecting to lose 2TB from each drive.

How reliable is SHR though? With a single drive fail. Imagine a worst case all good and next day its missing, nothing at all. Will it recover all my media? How long to recover 6TB of movie files?



Sorry to all of you nice people, I have ordered the 920+ so will be around like a bad smell for a good while. :)

I will try and do everything in little chunks, hopefully most of my questions are newbie ones and answered many times. Save you all banging your heads against the keyboards. :)


Big Thanks.
 
How reliable is SHR though? With a single drive fail. Imagine a worst case all good and next day its missing, nothing at all. Will it recover all my media? How long to recover 6TB of movie files
It works fine. Rebuilding the array in case on drive fails will take about 24-48h to complete if that was your question.

I have ordered the 920+
An excellent choice

W
I will try and do everything in little chunks, hopefully most of my questions are newbie ones and answered many times. Save you all banging your heads against the keyboards
Welcome to the forum.
 
How reliable is SHR though? With a single drive fail. Imagine a worst case all good and next day its missing, nothing at all. Will it recover all my media? How long to recover 6TB of movie files?
It’s redundancy. You should have backups. Nothing is guaranteed. It should keep you afloat until you replace or fix the failed disk (in a degraded state).

You can go for SHR 2 (protection against two drive failures), but everything comes at a price. For a small 4 bay, it can be an overkill unless absolutely necessary. And you’ll still need to keep a backup 🙂
 
Any tips or links to common setup mistakes? I would like to keep as much space free as possible. Losing one 8TB drive is not too bad. I bought the 6TB drive to fit into the final bay of the DLINK. Before it arrived the DLINK decided it didnt want to be seen anymore. Probably a windows update rather than the unit itself but I decided its got to go for something hopefull with better support and apps that work.


With a new NAS in mind I spotted the 8TB drives on sale and bought all 3 they had left. Thats why 3 8TB and 1 6TB. Spent a fortune on my PC etc. So need to stop somewhere. Although more RAM for the 920+ maybe nice :)


SHR will be fine if it offers some protection. Just clicked the RAID Calculator does not take into account the formatted space.. 6TB = 5.45TB of available. Nice if it included that. :)

Dinner time.. Thanks again... :)
 
Thanks for Raid calculator :)
Just keep in mind that the calculator page will calculate the final size based on the initial drive setup. If you start moving/adding drive at a later point, the calculation might be different especially if you change array types.

So again, the setup of the drives that the calculator shows is valid for 1st (fresh) setup only. Anything after that might be calculated wrong.
 
Drive was delivered, Amazon same day delivery is bonkers.. How do they do that??

Drives inserted and its setting up the SHR now. Powered on for an hour or so and at 3.5%.
Going to be a while me thinks..

Had an issue with the QuickConnect password getting rejected during the setup. Will have
another look when the drives have finished their thing.

Fumbled my way through blindly, knowing its easy to wipe and start over. But it seems
to be doing it right so far.. Fingers crossed.

Thanks
 
Last edited:
Should I start a new thread or should i keep to this one?

Its at 93% now, not sure if i should have skipped the verify process.


Question for today. Volumes.

Does it make any difference to sharing/limiting access whether its a single volume with many folders ot more volumes?
Any difference to managing them?

Should I make my Media a separate volume?


EDIT Using SHR 3x 8TB drives and a 6TB drive.

Thanks.
 
Think I may need help with the shares, blundered through again and I have access but the NAS didn't show up in windows as expected.

Add network location popped up which I accidently closed and then it was not there, strange...

Created 4 Volumes, I read it maybe safer. One media and 3 more personal ones. Mapping a drive letter was hit and miss.

Initially created 2 volumes video and photo. mapped drive letter to video but adding the photo one removed the video one?? Must have done something wrong. Maybe a mistake copying all my media to this device, just in case i need to start over.

Media Volume 1 shows in network now, so hopefully getting there.

Thanks
 

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