Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

I'm not sure if this topic belongs in Server or Networks forum.

Hi Scott, do you know if implementing A NAS solution for customer data backup and restore operations, will improve productivity, in comparison to External USB 3.0 drives?

I imagine, that a NAS would allow multiple technician to backup and restore operations simultaneously.

I'm concerned that the throughput would not be of sufficient speed to improve productivity.
Even with a gigabit LAN.

I"m considering something like the Synology DiskStation DS1815+ https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1815+

My shop currently uses external USB/eSATA drives to backup data customer's recovered files . This set-up work well most of the time. It can be inefficient to use on occasion. It becomes problematic when we are in our busy season.
Regards

Using a network backup solution will allow backups to be done without moving a bunch of drives around, and those backups can then also be automatically backed up again to other drives or other machines via scripts on the server. The main drawback is that they will take quite a bit longer over a network (even gigabit) than local eSATA or USB 3.0 backups. That is not much of an issue for repeating backups using software that supports incremental backups (copying only what has changed since the last backup) but may be an issue for one-time backups of large drives/lots of files. However since they don't need to be attended and especially because of the convenience I will say that most of my backups are currently done over a network to a server, even for customer systems that I only run once.

Bottom line: Yes, overall I think it is an excellent idea. Scott.

Yeah, good to hear. Anything that can improve our turn around time is welcome.
Thank you ,Scott
I'll post a follow-up soon. We have a staff meeting next Friday.
Regards