Hey if possible dont use NAS protocols like smb or nfs because you dont get Features like immutable Backups or Fast Block cloning. If you have to use synology you may can do this with iscsi luns with Refs Filesystem than you can use fast  Block cloning.

If you prefer NAS i would recommend nfs3 with a very restrective Export policy, maybe in a separate subnet.

Perfect for me are hardened linux Repos with direct attached / local storage. But than you cant use your syno.... 

I have a Synology NAS.  Besides Direct Attached Storage, are the other choices usable for a NAS in anyway?

 

 

You can also select option 2 - Network attached storage since it is a NAS.

Have a look at QNAP NAS devices. They have QuObjects which enables Object Storage on these devices with immutability supported. Pay attention to the specs. We already had some experience with it and a descent processor and sufficient RAM are necessary. Have a look at the HCL for QNAP on the Veeam website.

If you want to get crazy……there are options.

Option 1:  Setup the NAS as an ISCSI device and direct connect from the VBR repo server to the NAS as an ISCSI volume.  This would allow you to use REFS or XFS filesystems for block-cloning.  I don’t like running REFS on a NAS however because it likely is a software-based array with no batter-backed cache, and this can result in REFS filesystem corruption if some sort of issue such as a power blip where to occur where the server updates the file table stating a file has been written before the file is actually written causing a mismatch.  There have been conversations with Gostev in the past as well and he doesn’t trust the software-based RAID volumes because there can be some performance tweaks that could introduce file corruption, errors, etc.  I have a few folks using direct-attach with NAS’s, but it’s no longer my go-to option.

Option 2:  Setup the NAS as a NAS using the SMB/CIFS or NFS protocols.  You miss out on multipathing as available when using ISCSI and can’t take advantage of REFS/XFS block cloning tweaks.

Option 3:  Get's a little crazy in here, but if the NAS is capable of running a VM, you could load a Linux distro on the NAS and then use the local storage on the NAS as a XFS datastore which would allow block cloning and immutability all in a single box.  It’s not a super great solution, but I can attest that it does work.  Originally I was going to test such a configuration with MINIO using S3-compatible object storage for immutable backups until Veeam released support for native immutability on XFS.

I’m sure there are other ways to go about things here, and they all have their own versions of yuck, as well as their advantages.  As for me, my go-to is no longer to use a NAS and instead use a purpose-built Dell server that acts as the repository, and in some cases, acts as the VBR server orchestrating everything as well. 

I will note that I am starting to look at NAS’s in a different light however as I begin to deploy BaaS using the Veeam Service Provider model in which we provide backup as a service and store the majority of the backup data in Wasabi, but also leverage a small NAS as a short-term retention local copy of data for faster backups and restores.