Advice on NAS setup

I have some questions, and asking for some advice to suggest and see any holes in what I want to do.

I’ve been asked to deploy a storage solution for my company, well , more that I’ve forced the issue with the CEO, and he finally understand my concerns and agree’s it needs to be addressed.

We have about 25-30 users/windows machines who mainly have office docs, along with some servers, about 4 or 5, and PC acting as a file server for a couple of users in accounting with about 1TB on it.

To my shock and horror, most users keep documents on their machines, and sometimes backup to external USB drivesl with some doing NO BACKUPS at all. No scheduled tasks, just randomly when they remember or care to do so. :scream:

I’m looking at getting 2x Synology RS1221RP+ to configure with HA, and probably RAID 10, with either Iron Wolf Pro or Exos drives. I want to deploy this ASAP.

I am familiar with DSM, as I run a 918+ at home. I like the features Synology has.

I’d want to deploy Active Backup for Business along with snapshots. I’ll be mapping everyones documents & desktop folders to the NAS, and teach them to not store any documents locally.

My questions are;

I’ve seen Tom’s videos regarding Synology HA, and I just want to check I understand exactly what is synced.
If, I configure with Synology High Availability does it sync all the data and all settings (even from other apps)??
Does is just mirror from primary to secondary instantly/constantly?
Any info as how Synology High Availability works so I understand it correctly would be appreciated.
My understanding is that’s how it works.
Would HA be the preferable way, or having the 2nd one, just receive hyper backups with snapshot replication?

I’d also like to have snapshots running every 5mins on the users and well, all shared folders, and keep a retention schedule of, all snapshots for 1 day, latest snapshot of the day for 7 days, latest snapshot of the week for 6 weeks, and latest snapshot of the month for 3 months. I figure this should give a good amount of snapshots to recover from a potential ransomware attack from someone clicking on something they shouldn’t.

Would this be a good retention policy?

There is also a 2016 Server running WMware workstation (which I’d like to move over to a Proxmox server, but for the time being, want to just get it with a good backup strategy) running an old legacy SBS 2003 server which we require for some very old DOS based software we still need and is critical (best not to ask why). This was configured before my time.I want to configure an ISCSI drive, and have the drive be the location that has the VM file, mapped to the ISCSI, so again I can take snapshots of it, along with Active Backup for Business for the SBS2003. I think this is a better option for keeping it running and being able to recover it.

Thoughts?

So approx 30 desktop windows machines, along with a handful of servers (the servers don’t have much data that changes), which I want to run Active Backup for business on, how much storage at a rough guess would you say this would take up?

I understand DSM has deduplication for ABB, but just looking for some advice there. I run ABB at home, but it’s for a single server and 2 desktops. I also want to snapshot the ABB folder as an extra layer for backup.

Size wise, since most users are primarily working with office documents, along with daily ABB of all machines, and the snapshots of everything, I’m looking at either 8-10TB drives. Would you agree with the size, running RAID 10?

I’ll be adding dual 10Gb NICs to them, have one port a direct connection between the NAS’s, and the second port to a new 10Gb switch to provide enough bandwidth for the machines to be able to run ABB overnight.
I was thinking maybe stagger 5 machines at a time per 1 or 2 hours.
What schedule would you suggest?
Would the suggested setup have the bandwidth to cope with that many daily ABB’s running in that timeframe?

Would the RS1221RP+ with the drives I’m looking at in a RAID 10 config have enough throughput to handle this load of ABB running and get them done in that 8pm-8am timeframe?

Once I’ve got this all setup and running well, I’d then setup some cloud backup of everything but the AB4B folder.

Any thoughts and suggestions would be appreciated.

Synology HA is more than just the data and it’s constantly mirrors, I have the details covered here

You might want to also add SyncThing to your arsenal, handy for backing up between backups. After the initial sync it can be configured to sync changes and end users won’t notice.