Redundancy feels like safety until you actually need to recover something
A NAS has a lot of moving parts that come together to form a storage system that feels complete. With centralization of data, backups and redundancies in place, and cross-platform file availability set up, the NAS feels like a clear upgrade over having files scattered across laptops and external drives. Having done so much to get the setup in place, you start to think that once the NAS is up and running, the hard part is done.
But one must live with a NAS for a long time to realize that most NAS failures don’t come from major hardware issues but from little, everyday issues that keep piling up. So, it’s important to shed those assumptions and create an ironclad NAS system that meets your home and office needs.
RAID feels like a backup
Not all safety measures equally effective
RAID gives you confidence because it looks like a solid safety system that you have in place. Everything can still keep running even if one of the drives fails, which feels like the very definition of data protection. It didn’t occur to me what would happen if files were accidentally deleted or corrupted — something that happens very commonly with storage.
The primary purpose of RAID is to keep the system online in case of drive failures. That’s it. It will happily mirror mistakes or corrupted data, and it will preserve bad sectors across all disks. A good way out of this loop is to have a solid backup strategy in place that not only includes RAID but also has additional safety measures, including an off-site backup.
Drive failures are predictable
Warning signs don’t always come
I always thought that hard drive failures were something you could see coming, with NAS devices showing abundant drive stats, health indicators, warning signs, and early alerts.
