DAS or NAS for onsite backup?

Community
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So I’m looking into on-site backup of my home PC (I already have off-site backup sorted) and it seems like NAS (Network Attached Storage) is getting increasingly popular - but I’m wondering whether it’s overkill and whether DAS (Direct Attached Storage) is a better option as it’s cheaper and faster. DAS seem to be less and less popular though.

Pros and Cons or both?

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I’ve bought several NAS systems over the years. I have a Buffalo LinkStation Duo (got that a few years ago), and I just recently bought 2 Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duos so I could run them in parallel (one mirrors the other).

I personally love these devices, they are small, quiet, fast (at least for the Pro Duos), and you just set them up and forget about them. This past week, my computer crashed and I had to actually perform a restore, my data was safe and easily retrievable from the NAS pair. They also support several different capacities (from 2 TB to 8+ TB) and they support different RAID options too (if that is something you are interested in).

I actually just extended my LinkStation DUO (the oldest NAS I have) with a 2 TB external USB drive this weekend too. So you have upgrade potential too (the drives are easy to replace within the hardware too, granted I haven’t needed to do that yet.

I’d skip DAS, and go with NAS. It does seem a tad bit expensive but it is definitely worth the cost.

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The biggest advantage of NAS storage is that it can be accessed from any computer, tv or game machine on your network without a specific computer needing to be turned on to be able to access it.

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Thanks for the replies - so for multiple machines NAS is the way to go and for just one machine DAS will do the job.

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Yes but a single computer/tv/phone/game machine combination device doesn’t exist so it is just about certain that everyone will have at least three or four separate devices that will need access to the storage if not now then within the near future.

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I might actually be in the rare case where the machine I’m backing up is pretty isolated from the rest of the machines I use. The reason I want to keep it separate is because it’s a project (not simplelists related!) where the data is important. So I’m keen to avoid viruses etc and don’t want to backup any other machines to that drive - especially ones with downloaded videos etc

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