QOTD ⚡What kind of content are you backing up? Personal or professional? What is your current storage solution? Let me know! 👇 **** Check out tips about video editing computers, workflow and backing up your data in this video series ➡️ bit.ly/ThinkVideoEditing

TIP: If you're just looking for a NAS solution to access your data on the network and not redundancy, many modern network routers have a USB port that will turn your external drive into a NAS. You can then access that drive anywhere on your network.

As a certified network storage engineer, loved this video! Your explanation of what a NAS is and how it works was excellent! I might share this video to some of my non- technical people! Thanks Sean!

13:15 Everybody: simplify This guy: de-complexify

I'm glad he touched on the difference between "Redundancy" and "Backup" How many people actually backup their NAS? Probably none... People always mistake "Redundancy" for "Backup". They're NOT the same. Multiple drives in a RAID array gives you greater fault tolerance but if your array gets wiped out by malware, ransomware, etc. Its all gone. At the very least, get an external USB drive that matches the capacity of your NAS and setup an auto back up routine to back up your entire array to that external drive. AND PLEASE USE THE PROPER DRIVES DESIGNED FOR A NAS OR DATACENTER. I've had the same two 3TB WD Reds running in my DS212+ for the last 10 years with Zero issues. Only issue is capacity (I'm too cheap to spring for larger Reds). Aside from straight network storage the CPU is just fast enough for me to also run a DNS, DHCP and Media Server all in that same box.

OMG! I am one of those "multiple external hard drive" content producers who suffered a failure 3 days ago. I'm still in shock. So this video could not have been timelier! Thank you for explaining so completely. I now know what direction to go into, and how to change my production process so I never have to go through this emotional pain again!

You can certainly share your internal/external hard drive of your tower over your LAN. Most motherboards even support a RAID array of 0,1,10 that you can then share out over the network. All you have to do is configure the hard drive/s in the array you want, then use windows to share out that drive. As long as your tower stays online and connected to the network, you should be able to access the data from the wireless network from your laptop.

With the new routers, you can use ext drives to make a NAS so it is just as safe as buying a NAS setup. I have always gone by the 3-2-1 backup. 3 copies of all data 2 copies locally and 1 copy off-site. It has saved me at times.

Hey Sean, I have a daily Podcast/KZfaq show and with 1050 episodes data has become a challenge for us. Although we are quite organized, we've got 10 x 5TB Seagate external hard drives to house our data. A buddy of mine in a FB group just linked me to this video and my mind is blown. Instead of keep buying hard drives, I'm going to get one of these NAS systems. Your description here sounds like it solves SO MANY of my Dropbox/hard drive dilemmas. THANK YOU!

Hey Sean, I an old guy in lockdown that's coming to this from a non-techie viewpoint. I'm just starting to tell stories (ambitiously in multi media) and my learning curve is steep on everything. I've just upgraded my PC, and the future that I'm clawing my way into, is obviously your past. I just want to thank you for your clear, articulate enlightenment. You are very helpful. Thanks Jim

Whoa I was just wondering about this topic and here you are~

Don't know why but I really dug this video. There is a level of genuity to it. That and the fact that I never even thought about a NAS solution. Even though I have access to one.

NAS is the way to go for long-term storage. One power source, redundancy, less clutter, no rat's nest of wires, shareable. I love that Synology has expansion units. We initially did the 5 bay, then realized how quickly it filled up and added a 5 bay expansion with 3 10TB drives. Still room for two more drives!

The video is a good introductory video on NAS. One point of consideration with a NAS is to have it and the network gear (router or wireless router) on an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS). A sudden loss of power can be a little messy with a NAS. The network gear up will let you finish so you can shut down properly for a long outage.

Hey Sean! I found your channel about 2 months ago; about the time I took the plunge and started my YT channel not knowing how to do any thing relating to video, editing, social media, etc. You and Video Influencers have become my go to source for advice! Thank you so very much, I really appreciate you, and the advice you share, as well as the inspiration!!!! Thanks a lot!!-Jason

Searching for new storage devices. I would love to see what you guys have upgraded to in 2022. Blessings guys thanks for all your hard work guys.

Like Hansel and Gretel, I've been learning about NAS units by picking up little bits of information here and there. Had I started here, I might not have gotten lost in the woods as often as I have. :-) Excellent basic intro to NAS, and while it may bug some folks, as a professional educator (retired), your repeats of important points is a strength to your presentation.

I've been needing a NAS system for a while, or at least a massive backup drive. I have probably 5 external hard drives on my desk 🤣

Sean, nice video. I have the DS920 with 20 tb. One thing I would of mentioned is the Drives used. Standard drives aren't designed for 24/7 but NAS drives are and cost slightly more!

Love your advice.. Educational positive. Every video is the ultimate guide. Still struggling with a new channel and yours are the first videos on my go to list. Tech and You Tube authority thanks. Saving up for Nas.

Excellent information on the NAS system. Since I am new to content creating I use smaller portable external hard drives to store my data that I carry around, and a larger hard drive that I back that data up on. I have considered a NAS, but don't really have a need for it now. I will be upgrading to one in the future though!

As a small KZfaqr and Hobbyist, I’m still using external hard drives for back up and redundancy. USB powered 4TB at ~$100 makes it super easy. I have one external I travel with and 2 I use for back up and redundancy. I fully get the benefits of NAS, but it’s still too pricey for me - and a 6 bay unit is only using 3 drives (truly) because of the one for one backup. Great video. I may get there (NAS) one day. Cheers.

I've needed this video for a long time! Storage and backing up has been one of my challenges. Thanks for the tips Sean! As always, much appreciated!! Aloha~

Sean you totally make the lives of new KZfaqrs easier with great content! Thank you! 😎

I just started my channel and your advice has been amazing! Thank you

This was SOOOOO useful. THANK YOU! First video of yours that I’ve come across and I’m so grateful for your video explaining this in a really straightforward way🙏🏾

This was hands-down the best video I’ve ever seen on this topic. Wow what a way to go!!

This is the first video of yours I’ve watched. I found it super interesting and helpful. I do 24/7 live streams and have a massive storage problem when streaming/recording at 5000kbps x 6 different streams. I’ll defiantly look into a NAS. Thanks for the awesome video!

Love the NAS, love the USB drives, my solution was something else, I used a torrent based system on three locations, works very well for shared files. First started with BitSync (2013), and then moved forward.. Blows away this solution.

I love how the description so clearly and accurately outlines the overall topic of this video... Stating how this was about.. tripods ???

You can actually file share using an external drive. you just have to share the folder in which you are looking to access for data use.

Hey guys. KZfaq content creator, Synology DS214+ user, and frequent lurker. Remember that redundancy only works if one or two drives fail, depending on the array. It's possible for more than one drive to fail at a time, meaning you could lose all of your data. This is why redundancy is not a replacement for a backup like Sean said. Good intro to the world of NAS storage.

omg, didn't understand what NAS was until this. Awesome video!

Huge thanks for this video. So much info packed in 15mins. It’s 2022 and this info has helped me tremendously.

Excellent video. What I don't like about NAS is that everything is on-site. If my house burns at night, we lose the NAS, Camera, Phone, and backups. My router gives me a 3.0 USB connection to hook a hard drive to. In business, this sounds marvelous but for home, I think a 10TB drive with 1TB cloud back up of important stuff should work fine. Finally, I know what NAS is and can do. This video is very much appreciated.

Concise and to the point. Thank you for this informative video!!!

NAS Drive will be on my Black Friday shopping list for this year ~!

This is something i need. As i make karaoke duet videos i need somewhere to store all my tracks and other files i use and access them with ease.

A most excellent overview. I’ve just watched several KZfaq videos on this topic and this was by far the best. Thank you.

This is an extremely simple and great video! Thanks! It completely handled my confusion on what to go with.

Love when videos take 2 minutes to even start

Good to hear you mention offsite is mandatory for true backup, most forget this

I would agree NAS is more powerful and hard drive redundancy but they are more complex and as such there are a lot more points of failure in NAS than a simple external hard drive. For example setting up Ethernet is a lot more complex than USB with is plug and play. Also the operating system software running on the NAS could crash and if so you may not be able to access any of the hard drives without sending in the entire NAS unit for repairs. NAS has a motherboard which could have components fail separate from the hard drives.

Storage? Currently I use Dropbox, BackBlaze, and external drives. This NAS is interesting to learn about. I'll look into it further.

I have no interest in doing this but this video is informative as hell

Great video, and the Synology NAS unit is a great idea, however, it's certainly not bulletproof. I had a 4 drive Synology NAS unit set up as RAID using 2 Western Digital NAS 3TB drives. They were mirrored and everything worked fine until one morning when I could no longer access my data. Turns out that their was a problem with WD drives that they failed to tell the public, and I lost ALL of my data. It was unrecoverable, and I found out later that Western Digital was sued over SMR debacle in HDD. So you might want to mention to people to stay away from WD RED NAS drives. Fortunately, I had an older backup on a Seagate IronWolf drive and was able to recover 80% of my data, but it costs me a weeks work.

I love the topic for today! I have been thinking about investing in a NAS device & this was a big help.

Thanks for the information!! I have been struggling with this issue for months and it is getting paralyzing. Guess what? I am getting an NAS in 2 days and I chose Synology!!! Thank you again!!

I can tell that "ultimately" is one of your favorite words lol

I've been putting hard drives in Pelican 1300 cases for over 10 years now, using a hard drive dock to back up footage and mirroring it with FreeFileSync. I keep a "copy" in a storage unit away from home. I don't have remote access necessarily but I don't need it :)

Bro you're just in time, I need this;)

Just came across your channel. You have very good energy in your videos and intro and video quality is absolutely phenomenal my man !!

Thanks for your advice. This is really open my mind to get my data saved. ~ Warm greeting from Bali.

Great video. But nas with raid is about uptime rather than backup. I currently have a single drive nas which sync my photo folders on my PC, and I use a portable drive to backup what's on the nas. There are 3 copies of my photos. I was think about getting a file server with ZFS or snapraid.

Man , an old school black and purple linksys still rocking your setup. You’re lucky , mine went dead many years ago :)

You can share an HDD in the network!! I can't see the problem with that!! Nas is a nice solution for large data usage from multiple people. I mean, if you need 50 TB of storage, you can only have a NAS.

De-complexify, no. Simplyif, yes. Good explanation of network attached storage.

Sean I want to correct you on one thing I love your videos I’ve been following you for a couple of years if someone could not afford to buy a NAS system for backing up you can actually get an external hard drive I connected to a router on your network if you have that option on your router and make it into a network thing like you’re talking about Because I’ve done it

I'm planning on picking up a Drobo because they seem to have the easiest NAS solution. More user-friendly.

Next on Think Media: We're gonna compare an electric scooter vs a Ducati Panigale V4 R... Seriously, though, thanks for the info! It was very informative.

thanks for simplifying this, new to the concept and a lot of videos have been over my head.

Wow!! This tip is "priceless "!!! Thanks so much 1!🙌🎉🎉💕

Definitely great content, creative, and presentation skills!

Brilliant video! Explained the pros and cons of a NAS server in easy simple terms. Cheers!!

Don't you just love it when they talk about all other kinds of random crap before getting to that one simple explanation at the end?

Hobby work, and some professional. Most of the professional work does not require me to come back to the data at a later time. Would like to switch to a NAS setup in the future mainly just for the ability to have my own cloud storage.

Yeah I actually ripped out the 4TB drive from my external drive case and popped it into my pc, never regretted that :)

I love ur way of explaing.Easy to understand everything

I was highly considering buying a nas as I'm expanding beyond my hard drive and tired of paying streaming services. I've had drive crashes before on external drives and this would save that. I have a ton of old drives and I could just reformat them. Off site options you can use family member houses, as I don't have a lot of family in the area I would leave with this sort of thing I use a lock box at a bank.

Thanks you!! This is just what i Needed.

Thank you! I was confused because it sounds too good to be true but really it's just simple tech.

One thing he didn’t seem to mention is: if you’re savvy enough with tech, you can make your own NAS through a very basic desktop case that’s designed to hold as many HDDs/SSDs as possible. Stick a server OS, motherboard, etc on that, boom you got a yourself a NAS. Much more upgradeable one too, as you can swap out the cpu, psu, mobo, etc. and the average case can hold 6 drives easily, so I’m sure you can find one with more slots for cheaper. Also, you can easily set these up for raid configuration easily, whether it’s RAID 1, 0, or 1+0.

Thank you for great explanation!

The thing is you can share your drives between computers by setting up the sharing options and then the files on the drive you want to share across your local network.

I think these are great ideas... i for one while waiting on my NAS 1618+ also ordered a WD MyCloud HomeDuo... Same idea as it has the protection of a raid configuration and it was only 300+ bucks... My plan is to have that in one place as it is plenty of storage and the Synology 1618+ at work... I will keep those extremely vital files on both. This is a great learning curve for me as i do networking for PLC's on equipment... Now to save the programs and have access from wherever i am. I have had my computer stolen before and it is horrible to start completely over.

Technically, it is true that you would need to unplug an external and reconnect it to another device, but you could also have permissions configured for another device to access another host's network drives. It isn't really efficient, but it is possible to do so and I wouldn't recommend implementing that as a solution

This might be useful for me. My wife and I often collaborate on projects/videos so we've always had to plug & unplug external hard-drives.

Good info for determining whether or not to get a NAS. BUT, the annoying cuts between slightly different framing detracts from what's being said.

Thanks for breaking this down for all of us!

Just the information I was looking for! Thank you guys!

Audio production backing up to a series of rack mounted Glyph drives and need TB/USB-c so this was helpful in designing a raid backup solution

That was so informative and well explained. I've logged in just to give you a sub.

tHanks, I have a great system using my Triple Drive method of making backups.....But your video teaches me what the next level could be! Great fun to watch.....tHanks again. (My videos are so boring, people have often suggested I store them on old faulty dying drives....as a way to help society on a whole).

I develop software professionally. My main 2 computers use a high speed NVME SSD on the computer where the program resides (my new computer uses a SSD that can read at 4.5 G per second) It is still much faster to access data that is local rather than external or NAS (normally at least 10 times faster). My backup is on an internal hard drive (not as fast as SSD but much cheaper). My second backup is using a USB 3.0 connection to an external hard drive. If my main computer goes down, I can just plug my external hard drive into another computer and the just carry on. The best part is that this setup cost me less than $100, years ago for the external drive and I used an older hard drive to backup the M.2 NVME SSD on the main computer. I love the idea of a NAS but if your backup needs are only at the end of the day and not more than 4-6 Terabytes, I end up with 3 copies of my data, one of which is external and easily connected to another computer and best of all it cost me less than $100. (I setup a batch file and only backup the files that have changed that day) No NAS solution comes close to that level of safety, speed or cost. I think a NAS might make a great solution if you want to share data to multiple computers at the same time or have a library of videos or pictures that need shared to multi devices.

In order to keep the costs low I normally backup my files in LaCies Hard-drives of 4TB and purchase more as they get full. I use two hard-drives one for Daily basises storage and one for redundancy, I consider the quality of LaCies hard-drive good and reliable at least I never had a problem before. The cost of each hard-drive here in UK is approximately £100. I am happy with the current solution although I consider purchasing one of the Synology NAS solution in the near future.

Very informative thank you so much for explaining NAS and taking the time to make this video for people like myself trying to research and learn. All the best! Subscribed!

Thank you so much for providing useful video about back up. Please let us know how can we back up in two different locations. Different location may have a different network. Similarly please make another video that can explain how can we back up in two different location which help to get data if one location is completely destroyed.

I think it was really interesting to hear about this from a creators perspective, but I urge people, if the nas sounds interesting to you, look into it. There is so much more that they can do

If you use a NAS, you can´t switch of the web client on Windows, what brings several security problems. At home / small companys you should back up your data on two external HDDs. If you use a NAS, you should have a second one of the same model with the same setup on hand in case the NAS itself breaks.

We are upgrading more stuff to NAS, but we have several hard drives connected to one computer that we CAN access from all other computers on our network, the problem with that is that computer with all the drives connected has to be on to do that. Whereas with a NAS we are looking forward to just having one computer running (We used to have both editing computers on all the time) if we just need quick access to something on that NAS as opposed to having to boot the main computer just to find a files. but now the main computer only has to be turned on 5 days a week, as most smaller video tasks can be done on the other computer the other 2 days a week, with no drives connected, as long as we don't need all file access, lol, so NAS is where we will be totally migrated to soon. And there has to be a power saving? Our main computer has 4 drives inside and 4 external, those 4 externals are all independently plugged in whereas our NAS would be one power supply. so if not a power saving a plug hole saving, lol. thanks for the info

I have 2 918+ Syno's, when I bought my first, it was a one bay NAS and one of the first models from Syno. And it was ok for backups, nothing more, because we were talking a max 100Mb network. Then I bought a few years ago a 918+ and it changed my workflow drastically. Now I have 2 of these connected as master and slave in RAID10 and both a hot spare eSata drives to fill up my HD's to the max (all 8Tb Ironwolfs). And one USB drive from 4Tb for archiving purposes. I'm into music, so big mixes and sounds take a lot of disk space. I have a Dell server as well, but this annoys maker is more off than on. Because the Syno's are quiet.

Thank you so much. This is so helpful and exactly the solution I am looking for. Great job and thanks to you and your great team.

If you are on a network, you can share any disk on your computer, including external drives.

Thank you so much for all the information about NAS. This video is really helpful.

A NAS is nice for assessing files by all including hackers. If you just need backup backing up and turning off a external drive is not only safer but will live longer. Be sure to use high security on NAS. Remember if if your files are accessible on the web there accessible to all.

Love your channel it’s really helping me to learn more how to improve my channel . Keep up the great work

Yayy!! Your channel is growing drastically now. Waiting for the 1m!!

Hey, I have that Ugmonk shirt in the background. Sweet 👍🏻

Thanks for the well presented information, I do not have a solution just yet, but this is food for thought.

This is an excellent video. Liked and subscribed