Small Business NAS Advice?

[rich1000]

Hi,

 

I've been researching NAS solutions for our small office. We have been running with Time Capsule with a USB drive attached for a shared network drive for awhile, but I have always realized, it's not the best solution to our workflow or my vision of redundant backup.

 

We have 14 workstations: mostly Macs running Lion or Mountain Lion. A couple Win7 PCs.

 

We have a need to backup ALL these machines automatically and incrementally. Time Machine does a "decent" job in this for all our Macs. And a simple application for the PCs that backs up to the shared disk "kinda" handles those needs (not incremental).

 

We also have the attached USB drive that we share as a central drive for everyone to utilize to store important files (client documents, media, etc) that need to be shared within the office. Due to the nature of Time Machine, this drive does not get backed up, unless I manually pull the drive and sync up with another drive (and take off site).

 

SO... to cut to the chase... here's my vision of what I would like instead:

A NAS solution that has 4 bays. Each with, let's say 3TB (or 4TB even) each.

 

I'd like 2 of the drives to be used in RAID1 for incremental backup of all our machines. Time Machine is good for the Macs, and whatever software that may come with the NAS for PC would likely suffice to do incremental as well.

 

I'd like the other 2 drives to be RAID1 for a shared drive for the office to use for client files.

 

Now, I'm hoping the Shared drive can ALSO be backed up incrementally to the Backup RAID set. That way, the end goal, obviously, is that we have a BACKUP of all machines and Shared Drive incrementally (in the event someone deletes something important off the shared drive, we can go back to an hour or even a day, or week ago to retrieve). 

 

Lastly, I am interested in the RAID1 config for the Shared and the Backup sets so that I can hotswap out each of the secondary drives and bring them off site regularly. For that matter, I'll keep them off site normally, and bring them in once a week to plug in and sync up with their RAID counterparts.

 

Does that make sense?

Or am I overthinking it... or a better way to accomplish all this?

And of course, I'm not trying to find an inexpensive solution. Something that gets the job done for a reasonable price.

 

Thanks for any advice.

 

Rich