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Software for organizing scanned documents
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chirpfarm
Posted 3/7/2022 08:23 (#9546129 - in reply to #9545910)
Subject: RE: Software for organizing scanned documents


South Central MN
This is going to get long because there isn't a simple answer...

I am using multiple Synology NAS (Network Attached Storage). They are basically a box full of hard drives that connect to your network and basically act as a personal server or your own personal cloud storage. I personally do not like cloud-only backup options, because you never know how long they'll stay in business or if they'll be targeted by hackers. Therefore, I built my system to be entirely self-contained.

If you do any reading on backup principles at all, having a single hard drive for backup is not really backup at all. It is too easy for that drive to fail or get some sort of ransomware on it. As a single-location backup, it is also vulnerable to natural disasters such as fire or tornado.

In my case, I have a 4-drive NAS at home and a 2-drive NAS at my dad's house. The home NAS is backed up nightly to the NAS at dad's. We live several miles apart, so that should negate the natural disaster issue for the most part. In operation, drives 1 & 2 of the home NAS are linked together in a RAID array into 1 volume. This first volume is my operating volume. It is where I store all of my paperless documents and all other files such as family photos. I don't store hardly any files directly on the computer anymore, they're all stored on the NAS. The way the RAID array works is that drives 1&2 are exact copies of each other. This protects against one drive or the other physically failing, but it doesn't protect against the files being locked by ransomware.

In order to protect against ransomware, drives 3&4 of the home NAS form a 2nd RAID array volume which serves as my first backup destination. Drives 1&2 of the NAS at dad's form a 3rd RAID array which serves as my off-site backup destination. Every night, Synology software takes a snapshot of all the files in the first operating volume and saves backups to the 2nd & 3rd volumes. These backups are iterated daily, and I can set how many iterations I want to save. So, even if I did get infected with ransomware today, I should be able to just delete all the infected files and go back to yesterday's "clean" files.

As I said, it was going to get long, but this system should give me fairly robust backup capabilities of important files without having to rely on an outside company for cloud storage. It isn't perfect, but is pretty good. The best part about the NAS is that you can access it anywhere via the internet, so I always have my files with me so long as I have my phone or computer and internet access. If you are going to get deep into storing your files electronically, I highly, highly recommend that you look into solutions other than a single hard drive for backup. The single drive might never fail you, but if it does you don't have any backup at all.

At a minimum, I'd encourage you to look into a 4-drive NAS so you at least have redundant hard drives and iterative backups. If you don't have the ability to have a 2nd off-site NAS, there are options for cloud storage that backup off your NAS for the extra off-site redundancy. Note that if you do buy a NAS, they rarely come with the drives installed. You will need to buy them separately. Get at least twice the storage you think you'll need, I had to upgrade my drives after one year because I ran out of space.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS920+
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