kag's tech blog

Last week, I bought myself a Synology DS110j along with a 1 TB hard drive. I also took the opportunity to upgrade a segment of my network to Gigabit speed with a cheap D-Link switch. My computer and the NAS are now on that segment.

Now, I still haven’t decided what my strategy is gonna be. For now, my computer contains all the “master” files and a scheduled job synchronizes my computer with my NAS every now and then. This method has a few important advantages:

• All my files are backed up
• I access my files at full speed (local hard drive)
• Deleted files are actually sent to the Recycle Bin
• No need to migrate my iTunes library and my Lightroom catalogs

The only drawback is that my files are not live on the NAS. This means that if I download a video and want to watch it immediately on the media box in my living room, I have to run the sync job manually.

This also means that if I turn off my computer before the sync job runs, new files won’t be sent to the NAS until the computer is turned back on.

Because of that, I tried to switch roles: the NAS would store the master files and my computer would only keep backups. In normal usage, I would never use the files stored on my computer, I would always work on the NAS. All the different My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, (etc.) folders would be mapped on the NAS. This has a few drawbacks:

• I would always access my files at Gigabit speed instead of SATA speed
• Deleted files would really be deleted (not sent to the Recycle Bin)

However, I also found out that Windows 7 won’t let me add networked folders to Libraries. So I would loose that functionality, which I actually like.

So I’m back to my original strategy: masters stored on my computer and files backed up to the NAS on a regular basis. The NAS will always be a bit “behind”, but that’s the best solution I found.

Do you have a NAS? I would like to hear different point of views on that subject.