The NAS holds the family photos, the office documents and everyone's backups - which raises the obvious question nobody asks on setup day: what backs up the NAS? This page builds the answer in layers: protect the irreplaceable first, rotate an external drive away from the box, and actually test a restore before life tests it for you.
Everything before this page made the NAS reliable; none of it made the data immortal. Theft, fire, ransomware and one bad deletion all reach a mirrored pool without asking permission. The plan below is deliberately modest - it does not back up everything, it backs up what cannot be replaced, and it proves itself with a restore test, because an untested backup is a rumour.
Example plan - small, written down, and actually followed beats a grand plan that is not.
Walk the shares and mark each one. Irreplaceable: family photos and videos, office documents, scans, accounts - things no money re-creates. Replaceable: a media library you could obtain again, downloads, installers. The irreplaceable set is usually far smaller than the whole NAS, which is exactly what makes backing it up cheap and doable. Everything else gets snapshots and your acceptance of the risk.
Buy an external drive at least as large as the irreplaceable set - two, if the budget allows. Connect one, copy the critical datasets (TrueNAS replication or a scheduled task can do this to a pool on the USB drive), then disconnect it and store it away from the NAS - another room, a relative's home, the office. Swap the drives on a rhythm. A backup that stays plugged into the NAS shares the NAS's fate: the same theft, the same ransomware, the same power surge.
For the truly precious few gigabytes - documents, the best photos - a cloud copy adds the protection distance gives. Send it encrypted, with a key you control and have written down; an encrypted backup whose key is lost is a decorative file. Keep this layer small on purpose: cloud storage is rented by the terabyte, and the critical core rarely needs to be.
Your shares, users and tasks are work worth saving. After any setup change, download the configuration file from System → General and keep it with the backups. If the boot drive ever dies, a reinstall plus this file restores the NAS's personality in minutes instead of an evening of remembering.
Pick a file from the backup, restore it to a scratch folder, and open it. That is the whole test, and it is the difference between a backup system and a hope. Do it every three months - after any big change as well - and fix whatever the test reveals while the stakes are zero. Every experienced admin has the same story: the backup that failed was discovered during the emergency. The test moves that discovery to a calm afternoon.
Every step shown live on screen - installation, pools, shares and the settings that matter.
▶️ Watch Full VideoMatch it to how fast the folder changes. Busy office documents: weekly is a sane rhythm. Family photos: after every big event - a trip, a birthday - plus a monthly routine pass. The schedule you actually keep beats the perfect one you abandon.
Two, rotated, is the grown-up version: one is always away from the NAS while the other takes the fresh copy, so no single event - theft, fire, a faulty backup run - can take the data and its backup together. One drive, stored away between runs, is still vastly better than none.
A drive that leaves the house should not be readable by whoever finds it - so yes, protect it with a password or encryption, and keep that secret with your other recovery notes. An unencrypted backup of everything you own is a gift to a thief.