An Iomega NAS server appliance provides an easy-to-manage network storage solution for file-level data consolidation, sharing and backup across all Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, NetWare, UNIX.

• NAS storage is that it is much slower than a hard drive. Think of it as being more like a filing cabinet or bookcase. It’s primary role is STORAGE and sharing with other computer. With the purchase of my new Mac Mini I’ve decided it’s a good time to transfer the bulk of my data over to a network attached storage.
• External drive connected to your Mac. Time Machine can back up to an external drive connected to.

Updated: January 4, 2020 Home » Freeware and Software Reviews » Data Recovery, Backup And Cloud Storage

The problem with a growing startups or small business is scalability when they reach a path where they are neither small nor big, too big to use public cloud storage services and too small to afford enterprise storage solutions such as Amazon Web Services. Public cloud storage services start out cheap but could become prohibitively expensive as more data is stored.

Alternative 2020 Article ➤ 9 Free Self Hosted Cloud Storage Software For Home Office

Depending on factors outside your control, performance can be unreliable, at the same time there is a high privacy and security risk involved with storing certain data on someone else’s ‘cloud’ computer unless you pay a premium for enterprise military grade encryption.

This is where Prosumer comes into play, it hits the sweat spot between Consumer and Professional. Storage Operating System allows you to set up your own ‘Cloud’ on your network at your own cost. Because these OS uses a desktop computer as a storage system, it doesn’t make any sense for Home Users to run it for 24/7, if you’re into creating a central network storage system for your house, get a consumer NAS Storage from WD Red, D-Link, Asus or Seagate IronWolf. Without further ado, here are some free and open-source network-attached storage (NAS) OS software for small businesses.

↓ 01 – FreeNAS [ The Best ]

What is FreeNAS? FreeNAS is an operating system that can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share data over a network. FreeNAS is the simplest way to create a centralized and easily accessible place for your data. Use FreeNAS with ZFS to protect, store, backup, all of your data. FreeNAS is used everywhere, for the home, small business, and the enterprise.

What is ZFS? ZFS is an enterprise-ready open source file system, RAID controller, and volume manager with unprecedented flexibility and an uncompromising commitment to data integrity. It eliminates most, if not all of the shortcomings found in legacy file systems and hardware RAID devices. Once you go ZFS, you will never want to go back.

• Encryption – FreeNAS is the first and only open source project to offer encryption on ZFS volumes! A full-volume encryption option is available during volume creation, providing industry standard AES-XTS encryption which can be hardware-accelerated (when the processor has AES-NI capability).
• Replication – ZFS Snapshots are more than just local backups – they can be used to create remote backups as well. Replicating snapshots of the filesystem to a remote ZFS filesystem creates a complete duplicate there.
• Snapshots – Thanks to ZFS, snapshots of the entire filesystem can be made and saved at any time. As long as a snapshot exists, administrators can access files as they were when the snapshot was made.
• Data Protection – ZFS is designed for data integrity from top to bottom. RAID-Z, the software RAID that is part of ZFS, offers single parity protection like RAID 5, but without the “write hole” vulnerability thanks to the copy-on-write architecture of ZFS.
• File Sharing – File sharing is what FreeNAS does best. Every major operating system is supported with SMB/CIFS (Windows file shares), NFS (Unix file shares) and AFP (Apple File Shares) as well as FTP, iSCSI (block sharing), WebDAV and other methods of sharing data over the network are available.

↓ 02 – XigmaNAS / NAS4Free

XigmaNAS / NAS4Free is an Open Source Storage NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on FreeBSD. The NAS4Free operating system can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share computer data storage over a computer network. ‘NAS’ as in “Network-Attached Storage” and ‘4Free’ as in ‘Free and open source’, NAS4Free is the simplest and fastest way to create a centralized and easily-accessible server for all kinds of data easily accessed with all kinds of network protocols and from any network.

NAS4Free supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. It includes ZFS v5000 , Software RAID (0,1,5), disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T / email reports etc. with the following protocols: CIFS/SMB (Samba), Active Directory Domain Controller (Samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI (initiator and target), HAST, CARP, Bridge, UPnP, and Bittorent which is all highly configurable by its WEB interface. NAS4Free can be installed on Compact Flash/USB/SSD key, Hard disk or booted from a LiveCD/LiveUSB with a small usbkey for config storage.

• BitTorrent client (Transmission)
• iTunes/DAAP server (Firefly)
• Network Bandwidth measure tool (iPerf3)
• RRDtool
• UPnP server (fuppes)
• UPnp server (MiniDLNA)
• Webserver (lighttpd)

↓ 03 – OpenMediaVault

openmediavault is the next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. It contains services like SSH, (S)FTP, SMB/CIFS, DAAP media server, RSync, BitTorrent client and many more. Thanks to the modular design of the framework it can be enhanced via plugins.

openmediavault is primarily designed to be used in small offices or home offices, but is not limited to those scenarios. It is a simple and easy to use out-of-the-box solution that will allow everyone to install and administrate a Network Attached Storage without deeper knowledge.

• Debian Linux OS with Web based administration
• Volume management and S.M.A.R.T.
• Link aggregation
• Wake On Lan
• IPv6 support
• Email notifications
• File sharing

↓ 04 – Openfiler

Openfiler converts an industry standard x86_64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs. Openfiler ensures that storage administrators are able to make the best use of system performance and storage capacity resources when allocating and managing storage in a multi-platform network.

Openfiler provides key features such as iSCSI target for virtualization, Fibre Channel target support, block level replication and High Availabilty that are the mainstay of any business critical storage environment. Openfiler addresses all the key data storage concerns:

• Reliability – Openfiler supports both software and hardware RAID with monitoring and alert facilities; volume snapshot and recovery
• Availability – Openfiler supports active/passive high availability clustering, MPIO, and block level replication
• Performance – Linux 2.6 kernel supports the latest CPU, networking and storage hardware
• Scalability – filesystem scalability to 60TB+, online filesystem and volume growth support

↓ 05- Rockstor

Build and manage your own Linux & BTRFS powered advanced NAS and Cloud storage with ease. Rockstor Small and Midsize Business (SMB) Cloud Server is the recommended solution for organizations with several hundred Terabytes of capacity requirement. Your organization may rely on expensive public cloud storage and also store a lot of data locally causing you to switch between local and cloud and ultimately resulting in inefficiency and loss of productivity. With Rockstor as your Cloud Server, works great on Microsoft’s Windows 10 and Apple’s macOS.

• Build your Private Cloud Storage and empower your organization with a hybrid workflow leveraging the best of both public and private cloud storage
• Seamlessly integrate with public cloud storage resulting in efficiency and lower operating cost
• Scale your storage needs with low incremental cost
• Manage your storage with little to no IT experience

↓ 06 – PetaSAN

PetaSAN is an open source Scale-Out SAN solution offering massive scalability and performance. PetaSAN uses modern cloud based technologies to provide the elasticity and agility to scale up the storage cluster simply by adding more nodes, this can be done at any time and in a truly non-disruptive manner.

PetaSAN is designed from the ground up to do one thing: provide highly available clustered iSCSI disks. In PetaSAN, an iSCSI disk can have many access paths, each identified by its virtual IP address. These IP addresses are clustered across several storage nodes.

↓ 07 – ESOS – Enterprise Storage OS

Enterprise Storage OS is a quasi Linux distribution based on the excellent SCST project; its purpose is to provide SCSI targets via a compatible SAN (Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, iSCSI, FCoE). In a nutshell, ESOS® can easily turn a server with the appropriate hardware into a disk array that sits on your enterprise Storage Area Network (SAN) providing sharable block-level storage volumes.

Typical uses for an ESOS® “storage server” include VMFS datastores on VMware ESX/ESXi, Windows NTFS volumes, Linux disks, etc. A high performance, purpose-built (appliance like) Linux base built from scratch, with no relation to other Linux distributions.

• ESOS is memory resident — it boots off a USB flash drive, and everything is loaded into RAM. If the USB flash drive fails, ESOS® will send an alert email, and you can simply build a new ESOS® USB flash drive, then replace the failed drive and sync the configuration.
• Kernel crash dump capture support. If the ESOS® Linux kernel happens to panic, the system will reboot into a crash dump kernel, capture the /proc/vmcore file to the esos_logs file system, and finally reboot back into the production ESOS® kernel — all automatically. ESOS® sends an email alert on system start-up and checks for any crash dumps.
• Two operating modes: Production (default) & Debug. With “Production” mode, the performance version of SCST (make 2perf) is used. If you find you’re having a problem and not getting sufficient diagnostic logs, simply reboot into “Debug” mode (full SCST debug build, make 2debug) and get additional log data.
• Enterprise RAID controller CLI configuration tools. Popular RAID controller CLI tools are an optional install with ESOS® (eg, LSI MegaRAID, Adaptec AACRAID, etc.) which allows configuration (add/delete/modify) of volumes / logical drives from a running ESOS® system.
• ESOS® is compatible with most popular enterprise RAID controllers and Tier-1 server hardware. It currently supports the following front-end target types: Fibre Channel, iSCSI, InfiniBand (SRP), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
• A text-based user interface (TUI) that provides an easy to use interface with convenient storage provisioning functions; see how it looks on the 02_Screenshots wiki page.
• Clustering / high availability (HA) components: Pacemaker + Corosync + DRBD
• Create advanced back-end storage block device configurations using Linux software RAID (md) and Logical Volume Manager (LVM2).
• Create virtual tape libraries (disk based) that can be used on your Storage Area Network (SAN). Works with popular software solutions such as Symantec NetBackup, Symantec BackupExec, EMC/Legato NetWorker, Bakbone Netvault, Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), and Bacula. Support for VTLs in ESOS® is made possible via the mhVTL project.
• Inline data de-duplication using lessfs; includes support for encryption and compression using QuickLZ, Google’s Snappy, or LZO.
• Support for Linux Ethernet bridging and NIC bonding (EtherChannel).
• Software-based block layer cache solutions: bcache, dm-cache/lvmcache, and EnhanceIO.
• Tiered storage devices with automatic migration and “smart” placement of data chunks via the BTIER project.
• Support for using Ceph RBD images as back-end storage devices.
• Advanced Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support: ESOS® includes the fcst “software” FCoE target driver, and has the ability (build options) to support Emulex OCS FCoE CNA / Chelsio Uwire FCoE CNA hardware targets.
• The advanced ZFS storage subsystem is supported as a build option (via the ZFS on Linux project).

↓ 08 – CryptoNAS

The CryptoNAS project brings data encryption to the masses. The CryptoNAS live-CD is made for people who want to encrypt their data without bothering about complicated technical issues. A computer running the CryptoNAS live-CD works as a fileserver (NAS) that encrypts your private data. The CryptoNAS-Server package adds a user friendly, web-based frontend for harddisk encryption to an existing fileserver.

Make your Mac invincible

If there’s one thing you need to remember when dealing with high-tech devices, such as laptops and desktops, is that you should always have a recent backup on hand. While it’s true that Macs are as dependable as computers go, no one is protected from their processor overheating, battery dying, files being corrupted by malware, or just a spilled cup of coffee.

External hard drives have been around for decades. First they connected to your computer through USB-A ports and could hold just a few dozen gigabytes. Eventually, they learned to transfer files over WiFi and grew up in size to a few terabytes — becoming de facto the best personal cloud storage available to most people.

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But with the explosion of smartphones and streaming services, the amount of media data being saved on our devices has greatly exceeded what regular hard drives can offer. Today, most of us need a robust and expendable home cloud storage solution that’s able to protect our data seamlessly in the background.

What Is A NAS Hard Drive?

NAS (or network attached storage) in many ways is just the right answer for those who want to upgrade from outdated external hard drives and beginner My Cloud app look-alikes.

A network attached storage device is not only capable of wirelessly storing everything you’ve ever created (they generally start at about 2 TB) but also divide its capacity between a few people (so every family member could have their own drive, for example), stream media to Apple TV or Bluetooth speakers directly, and act as a central hub for all storage, with all your other hard drives connected to it.

So let’s look at the best NAS for Mac on the market in 2020, covering every target audience segment.

Simple: Western Digital My Cloud Home

When you just want to graduate from an external hard drive to a network attached storage for Mac, there’s no better candidate than WD My Cloud Home.

Western Digital doesn’t even call this network storage a NAS drive but rather addresses it as a personal cloud storage device. Still, My Cloud Home encompasses all the attributes of grownup NAS drives without the price tag. It goes from 2 to 8 TB in storage capacity, can save all your information via WiFi automatically, allows remote access through a My Cloud app, features shared folders as well as individual volumes, and is capable of streaming to Sonos, Google Chromecast, and more — all starting at just $159.99.

Powerful: Western Digital My Cloud Expert Series EX2 Ultra

If you want to combine the ease of use we’ve all come to expect from WD devices with a power of true NAS storage, take a look at the WD My Cloud Expert series.

The EX2 Ultra is a real NAS drive that could come unpopulated (without hard drives) so you can install your own storage or take up to 28 TB right from the manufacturer. Unlike My Cloud Home, EX2 Ultra introduces RAID (redundant array of independent disks) options that let its two hard drives clone each other and carry the same information for maximum protection.

In addition, WD My Cloud Expert EX2 Ultra is powered by a dual-core processor for ultra-fast streaming and encrypts your hard drive volumes by default.

Affordable: Buffalo LinkStation 220D

In some cases, you might care less about how intuitive your NAS storage is, what you’re really after is a cheap NAS with good security built in. That’s where you should try Buffalo LinkStation 220D.

While LinkStation 220D might not win any awards for its user-friendliness, it’s a straightforward unpopulated NAS for Mac that starts at $119.99 and includes RAID support (with an additional USB-A on the back) as well as drag-and-drop backups.

You could set up a shared folder through Buffalo’s Navigator app, but it would be more difficult than you think. Same with getting your iTunes streaming server to work. Overall, good enough for straightforward tasks.

Nas Storage Virtual Machine

Advanced: Synology DiskStation DS218

Stepping into high-end but still consumer-oriented NAS storage solutions, we can find Synology DiskStation DS218. It comes unpopulated to let you combine your own storage devices and features a Gigabit Ethernet port for connecting to your router as well as three USB-As for any other storage volumes you might be using.

DiskStation DS218 is RAID-enabled and can act as a media server with real-time 4K video transcoding to Apple TV or any other player — all running on a quad-core 1.4 GHz processor. Some would say DiskStation might simply be too much for a casual user, and they will be right. But for some, it’s just what they were looking for all along.

Professional: Drobo 5N2

Those who work in the fields of photography, animation, or video production know how much unique data could be worth. From that perspective, Drobo 5N2 is not an expensive device at all, although it starts at about $550 unpopulated.

Drobo 5N2 features five hard drive slots, some of which can be used for RAID and some for actually expanding the NAS storage capacity. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports can be combined into one to provide astonishing transfer speed for the high-end devices that can handle it. This NAS even features its own internal battery for a complete fail-proof setup.

How to properly back up your Mac

Whether you’re using NAS or a regular external hard drive for your backup plan, you need to know how to approach backups in a comprehensive manner, so you don’t forget any important files.

Get Backup Pro is one of the most versatile backup managers you can find. It instantly connects to your NAS drive and offers incremental backups on a set schedule or cloning options that allow you to reboot your Mac from an external drive should it break. Get Backup Pro’s speed and reliability are unparalleled, far exceeding those of Time Machine, for example.

How to recover lost files from an external drive

Mistakes happen and regardless how robust your backup solution is, there would be a moment when you’d accidentally delete a file not backed up anywhere else, be it from your Mac or an external drive. What do you do now?

Disk Drill is master data recovery software that’s able to get into the deepest corners of your data volumes and retrieve information that you thought was forever gone. Your best friend here is to act quickly and launch Disk Drill right after you saw a much-needed file disappear — that’s why keeping this app in your toolkit at all times is a true secret lifesaver.

How to make the most out of home cloud storage

Mac Nas Drive

Nowadays, most of us have already signed up for all the free tiers at all the most popular cloud storage providers: DropBox, Box, OneDrive, Google One, and so on. Some of us even have paid plans. The problem is all of them being scattered in various places and easy to forget.

CloudMounter offers a genius solution to gathering your cloud network storage solutions (from Amazon S3 to Backblaze) in one place by mounting them on your Mac as real hard drives, essentially folders like any other. This provides you with a new world of possibilities when it comes to searching through your files, ensuring proper encryption, and effectively transferring data.

As you can see, picking the best NAS hard drive has a wealth of advantages over using a regular external hard drive. What’s better, you can enhance this experience even further by mounting all cloud network storage as local drives with CloudMounter, backing up files securely with Get Backup Pro, and recovering anything that’s lost with Disk Drill.

Best of all, CloudMounter, Get Backup Pro, and Disk Drill are available to you absolutely free for seven days through Setapp, a platform of more than 170 outstanding apps for your Mac. And you can try them all today at no cost to see how else you can improve your daily life without any effort on your part.

Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.

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Nas Storage For Mac