A NAS server is one of the most popular devices in homes, and it is that we can give it a large number of uses such as managing all the home automation of our house with Home Assistant, being the multimedia center for movies and series, as well as storage of all our most important files and folders, to keep them safe. Thanks to these devices, we will be able to make backup copies of different devices to the NAS, with the aim that they are always available through the Internet. Today in this article we are going to explain why combining a NAS with an external hard drive is a very good idea.
Reasons to use an external USB drive
Although NAS servers are designed to safeguard our information with different techniques, it is possible that at a certain moment there is a disaster at the hardware or software level, so it is a very good idea to have an external USB hard drive to make a backup. external backup, that is, as a backup.
Unrecoverable Corrupted RAID
It is always advisable to have different types of RAID that allow us to have fault tolerance, either one or more disks. For example, if you have two hard drives in your home server, it is best to configure a RAID 1 (mirror), if you have three or more, you can configure a RAID 5 that will provide you with very good performance. In the case of having four disks or more, you can use RAID 6 or RAID 10 among others. You can see our tutorial on operating systems for NAS where we explain all the available options.
If a larger number of hard drives in our NAS crash than the fault tolerance of the RAID, we will automatically lose all our files and folders inside as it will be completely unrecoverable. We must be very careful with this, because we could irretrievably lose all the data. For example, let’s imagine that we have a total of four hard drives, and we choose to use a RAID 0 of all of them, as soon as one of the drives crashes, all the data will be lost.
If we had an external hard drive to do the backups, we will not lose any data. The possibility of doing the same but in the Cloud would also allow us to recover the data, however, at the data transfer level, using an external drive is clearly faster and more immediate.
hardware failure
If we have a hardware failure in our server, although the data contained in the hard drives will remain safe, you will not be able to access them until you change the NAS or send it for repair, so we do not have data availability in this case. . Although it is generally rare for a NAS server to have a major hardware failure, the current transformer and even the power supply can be broken, in addition, the motherboard of the server itself could also be damaged, something that is not usual but that yes occurs.
Avoiding this is not within our reach, the only thing you can do is save all the data on an external medium, in order to be able to access your data without problems. For this reason, it is highly recommended to use 3-2-1 backups, where we have external copies locally and not connected to the network, as well as copies in the cloud or Cloud.
NAS hacking
In order to access the NAS servers from outside, we have to open ports on our router or use a VPN server. If we do not carry out an adequate security configuration, our equipment can be exposed to the Internet, so malicious users (cybercriminals) could try to enter our server in order to hack it, enter as administrator and take full control of the device.
Although in this article we have explained on many occasions and step by step everything you must do to be protected, it is possible for a cybercriminal to find a vulnerability in the operating system of your server, and take full control of it. This has already happened in the past with different brands, where their NAS has been hacked and all their files have been deleted or encrypted, making them unrecoverable.
Ransomware infection
This is closely related to the previous case, if a cybercriminal is able to take control of our server, he could infect it with a ransomware specifically designed to encrypt all data and demand a ransom for accessing said data again. This is one of the worst scenarios where we can find ourselves, but this is not common, so you should also keep in mind that it is unlikely that you will get infected if you have followed our recommendations to protect a NAS.
For all these reasons, it is highly recommended to use an external USB hard drive for external and local backups. If we buy a large capacity hard drive (about 4TB), we will be able to save all the data from the server on it as a backup, in addition, we must bear in mind that today they are all USB 3.0, so we will have a high rate of data transfer. It would be highly recommended to make backup copies at least weekly, with the aim of losing as little data as possible.
