Cheap UPS to protect your NAS
January 28, 2020•305 words
Secure. That. Media!
I bought a new Synology DS1019+ last year and have 3x 8Tb disks filled with thousands of photos and video's. Also, I recently became a dad (🎆!) and the storage of my photos has become much, much more important. I'd like to have all digital media of my child, plus any media they might be interested in (pictures of young mom & dad boozing it up) securely stored for later consumption.
A NAS, however, is not a backup (obviously). So I'm already running nightly incremental encrypted backups to a cloud-based storage, which is itself snapshotted daily and which are stored off-site.
Cheap alternative
With that taken care of, I'd like to be more protective of my NAS. Recently there have been two short power outages in the Amsterdam-area, plus we had a power spike due to bad weather. Protecting the NAS with a power spike plug and hooking it into a UPS seems like the best option. But what if I don't want to spend a lot of money on both? Well...
[17:16] User "Cheap-UPS-and-Spike-Protector" joined the chat.
Synology provides a list of compatible devices, but those for my model ended up begin slightly too pricy. I was looking for an affordable yet reliable solution.
The solution
Enter the Eaton 3S 550, a cheap battery + spike protector in one. Officially not supported by Synology, but I decided to take the gamble anyway. When plugging it into my NAS the DSM software had no trouble recognizing it, gave no warning and allowed me to set my power-off configuration.
I'm too afraid to pull the plug on it, so I'll just have to wait and see if it's actually secure. But I'm quite confident it'll work and should give my NAS about 20 minutes to power down.