The Synology DS923+ NAS is the storage anchor for the lab, with four 18 TB drives in a one-drive-fault-tolerant SHR layout. It holds photos, general storage, Time Machine backups, computer backups, Proxmox backup data, and a large local media library.
Recovery Layers
- Proxmox Backup Server protects VMs and LXC containers, with the NAS as the backup target.
- The main desktop has its own Backblaze backup path.
- Important working documents and thinking notes live in an always-syncing Dropbox workflow.
- The MacBook uses Time Machine to the NAS.
- Synology snapshots are enabled on some shared folders, but not all.
The media library is large and lower priority than personal documents, photos, and system backups. It is stored on the NAS, but it is not treated the same way as irreplaceable personal data.
What Gets Priority
The highest-priority data is personal work, photos, important documents, and system state that would be painful to rebuild. Game files and large replaceable media are lower priority. The current strategy is practical rather than perfect: keep the important things in multiple places, keep VM/LXC recovery available, and continue improving restore testing over time.
What This Taught Me
RAID or SHR is useful for redundancy and uptime, but it is not a backup. Sync is useful for convenience, but it is not the same thing as versioned recovery. Snapshots are excellent for quick rollback, but they do not replace off-device backups.
The next maturity step is a clearer restore-test log: one VM/LXC restore, one personal file restore, one Time Machine check, and one review of which data truly belongs in the off-site path.