Sunday, March 27, 2016

Synology DS1515+

Recently, we got a Synology DS1515+. For those that don’t know, this is a network-attached storage device (NAS). There are lots of competing products with all sorts of options for number of disks it can hold, what type of RAID it supports, how many network ports, etc. Ultimately, this is really just a computer with specialized software to hold the disks and to present the disks in a lot of different formats and interfaces. If you wanted, you can use an old computer and run something like FreeNAS on it to make it do something very similar. Like most things, you can either build everything yourself with all the customizations you want. Or you can also just buy something like this DS1515+ and get things going in a short amount of time. The choice is yours.

As I grow older, with more responsibilities, and a larger family, I find myself with less and less time to tinker with things. I just want things to work. For that reason, I chose the Synology. It is absolutely amazing how much of my life is digitized. I also want more of my life digitized. There’s too much paper already. It’s getting close to tax season and all I see around me is paper. I don’t mind it when Richard draws on the papers and gives us another absolutely amazing expression. But when it is just forms and boilerplate templates, it drives me crazy.

So I’m at least trying to do my part by putting everything into Synology. I’ve setup Crashplan to back up the stuff and it looks like it will take around 31 days to back up 2TB. I wish I had my work’s ISP where we have 1Gbps bandwidth. I’ll see what will happen first, will Crashplan finish backing up my stuff or will my son be born?