Time Machine with NAS?

[Peakoverload]

My Time Machine USB drive failed recently and so far I've bought 2 replacement USB drives (each 6TB) but find the fan noise and spinning noise of them too loud (I have a home recording studio and need it to be as quiet as possible). My other 2 USB drives are much quieter but smaller capacity.

I'm therefore seriously considering moving over to NAS and completely replacing all my drives. The NAS I'm looking at has a USB port to allow an external drive to be connected and apparently when you do this it appears as a shared folder on the NAS. Does anyone know if you can set Time Machine to use this drive/shared folder to backup to i.e. all my documents etc are on the NAS but then Time Machine backs up the NAS to the USB drive attached to it?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

My Synology NAS has support for Time Machine without the use of an external drive. So I can enable Time Machine support and create an user and point my Mac to it. I'm sure other recent NAS' would do the same thing.

 

[Slydude]

I can't say for sure that the option to have TM mack up to an external drive attached to a NAS but it should wrk, TM has had the ability to write to such drives for some time if the NAS was a Time Capsule or similar device. Things should work.

×

 

[MacInWin]

Sorry, I needed to read the entire OP. Don't know if TM can pass through the NAS to the attached drive. Would seem to be doable, if the attached drive shows as a folder on the NAS. Never tried it.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Sorry, I needed to read the entire OP. Don't know if TM can pass through the NAS to the attached drive. Would seem to be doable, if the attached drive shows as a folder on the NAS. Never tried it.

Can be done if your manually mount the disk attached to the NAS, but I've found that it's easier just to hit my NAS and have it take care of it. Additionally, since my 4 disks are RAIDED, the TM backup is as well.

 

[Peakoverload]

Thanks all for the replies. I also e-mailed the manufacturer asking the same question and they responded saying that technically it is possible but they don't recommend it as if the connection were ever lost the entire backup would be lost. In all honesty, I don't quite understand this and NAS is something I've never even looked at before so it's all a bit new and confusing.

Basically this is what I have at the moment:

2x 4TB USB drives each with about 1.5TB of data on them consisting of photos and music
1x 1TB system drive in my iMac with around 500GB used
1x 6TB USB drive set as Time Machine drive

So currently I have around 3.5TB of data that I would like to backup on to something to replace my 6TB Time Machine drive simply because every 6TB drive I buy I find is too noisy.

Options:

1. I buy a 2 Bay 6TB NAS set as RAID 0 and just set that to be a Time Machine drive.

Pros: Simple to do
Cons: A lot of money to fork out for a backup and I wouldn't be getting any extra benefit of a NAS

2. I buy an 2 Bay 6TB or 8TB NAS replace set as RAID 0, copy all the data from my 2 other USB drives onto the NAS but then need a way to backup the NAS
Pros: More flexibility
Cons: Potentially a little more expensive, more complicated for backups.


What I'd like to do but can't afford to do is to buy a 3 Bay NAS and use RAID 5 this would slightly reduce the need for a backup (I don't need to backup different versions, I just need an archive to protect against loss of data) and could use a quieter, smaller USB drive attached locally to do weekly snapshot backups.

How do the backups on a NAS work then? Can you set them to incremental, differential etc and can they be scheduled etc?