World Backup Day has arrived, and like every year, is reminding you that it’s time to be smarter about your data. Whether it’s beloved family photos, Time Machine backups of your Mac, or your expansive media server, having plan in place to ensure all of your data is protected is crucial. NAS plays an important role in this, and today for the occasion, we’re taking a look at what three different models from Synology bring to the table to join all of the price cuts now live on hard drives and more. Head below for all of our World Backup Day NAS recommendations, tips, and tricks.
Best World Backup Day practices: 3-2-1 rules supreme
Even if you already have a standard old hard drive plugged into your machine for handling backups, there’s more to the whole game of keeping your data safe than just that. You’ll of course want to find the setup that works for you, but the most comprehensive way to keep files safe is known as the 3-2-1 plan. Adopting this strategy means you’ll need three total copies of your information, two of which are located on different mediums. That final copy should be set up offsite to ensure that even if your home floods or anything else in the realm of disaster happens, your data is safe.
Having a NAS like any of the following recommendations is a great way to kickstart that plan, be it setting one up at your house as the first line of defense or a second unit at a family member’s place. As for the other checkboxes to tick off, over at 9to5Mac we broke down some popular Mac-friendly cloud backup solutions that can certainly help complement the hardware side of your kit.
Synology DS220J is perfect for first-time NAS owners
If you’ve been a longtime reader at 9to5Toys, our top pick should not be surprising in the slightest. If you’ve never toyed around with always-on storage before and are looking for your very first experience with a NAS, one of the best ways to get into the Synology game also happens to be one of the most affordable. The DS220J NAS has long been a personal favorite, and year after year, this has been a hit with our readers. With support for up to 16TB of storage, the is a notable solution for handling Time Machine backups and the like with support for 112MB/s transfer speeds. It’s the least capable of the NAS we’ll recommend but serves as a perfect starting point.
Entering at $189.99, it’s also quite an affordable offering for those looking to get routine backups all squared away. While you’ll have to supply your own storage via a 3.5-inch hard drive, Synology’s easy-to-use interface and overall reliability make this a more compelling option than some of the cheaper NAS out there.
Get better performance with the DS220+
If you’re looking to handle more than just a few Macs or PCs, you might need a little extra power under the hood. That’s where the brand’s DS220+ machine comes into play. This one is of course just as capable for routine backups, but can also provide faster transfer speeds for taking care of backing up media files. If you’re someone who edits video, be it for simple TikToks or more professional use cases, a NAS like this is just the ticket.
This home NAS breaks free of the more basic workload capabilities you’ll find noted above, being able to handle running Plex and loads of other services. Its price makes it a solid offering for those who want a little more power than the entry-level model but aren’t in need of a more premium offering.
Clocking in at the $299.99 price point, the Synology DS220+ NAS is a bit more expensive than the entry-level model highlighted above. But we found that’s more than justified by how capable the machine is in our hands-on review.
Synology DS1522+ is the perfect all-rounder for World Backup Day
Climbing to a more formidable position, Synology DS1522+ is one of the brand’s most recent releases. We just took a hands-on look at this NAS last fall where I called it the “last NAS you’ll ever need.” That makes it an easy highlight to provide a bit more power to setups that need more than a two-bay configuration. Everything starts with a Ryzen 2.6GHz R1600 Dual-Core processor and comes backed by some other notable specs like 8GB of DDR4 RAM out of the box and up to 796MB/s transfer speeds. There are four Gigabit Ethernet ports which are perfect for link aggregation, as well as five hard drive bays that can hold far more storage than the other two models above.
But the real reason to bring home this machine is its upgradability. The Synology DS1522+ is one of the brand’s most customizable NAS yet, going as far as to even let you upgrade the network interface card with a 10GbE option. The dual M.2 slots can be used to install some NVMe drives to set up hardware caching, and the RAM can also be swapped out if you need to handle more memory-intensive tasks. It has been a workhorse in my personal setup for the past several months and the NAS I’ve recommended countless times since I got my hands on it back in August of last year.
The $699.99 price tag is going to make this one a bit tougher of a sell compared to the other options, but it has been well worth the cash to me. Throw in some extra spending to grab the 10GbE version, and you’re going to be set for ages. Sure, it might not be the last NAS ever, but it’ll continue serving you for everything from Plex to backups and more for years to come.
World Backup Day 2023 is the perfect time to switch to a NAS
All said and done, 2023 is the perfect year to make the switch. With cloud storage services becoming less reliable, the Google Photos snafu from previous years immediately comes to mind, amidst our rising data footprints from larger files and videos, having a local copy is becoming increasingly valuable. And if there’s one takeaway from World Backup Day this year, it’s that there are a series of different options to consider.
Of course, if you’re looking for storage to help kickstart your server or just expand an existing setup, there are plenty of discounts today, too. We’re tracking price cuts across every storage medium today for World Backup Day 2023, including 3.5-inch hard drives perfect for the NAS above, internal NVMe SSDs, and even external hard drives and solid-state drives. There’s up to 55% in savings to be had through the end of the day, so be sure to take full advantage of the discounts, which start from $13.
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