Hi there. I am new to the topic of NAS and have a couple of questions. Recently, a couple of months ago, My Windows PC fell victim to ransomware, Some data, photos/music/videos/etc, were lost and some I was able to recover... My question is, are NAS devices equipped with an anti-virus of sorts to prevent this from happening to me again??? I would like to have storage that is easily accessible across me network but I want something secure.. I have even thought of have 2 drives, a primary anda back-up... Any input or advice would begreatly appreciated. Thank you.
The NAS has antivirus, but I don't know if it would protect against ransomware (and it would be safest if you assume that it might not).
There has been some discussion on ransomware here from time to time.
If the NAS has enough free space, then the NAS snapshot feature offers some level of protection - letting you roll back to the older unencrypted files. But that requires that you keep the NAS < 40% full. Then when the files are encrypted, the old copies are retained in the snapshot, with the total storage staying well below 90%. At the 90% threshold, the NAS will begin deleting the oldest snapshots automatically, and of course those are the unencrypted files you want to keep around. It requires some discipline to keep the storage below 40%.
A backup that is not writable by the PC is probably the strongest option (and you should have a backup of the NAS anyway if you use it for primary storage). So you could (for instance) get a USB backup disk, and attach it to the NAS. Then run automated backups from the NAS shares to the USB drive. You should think about the backup pace - if you back up automatically too often, the encrypted files might propagate to the USB drive before you notice. Not often enough, then you lose more files that weren't backed up.
The ~40% figure would be assuming the worst case scenario where all the files are encrypted.
If you mainly have huge files (e.g. multiple GB files) then ransomware tends to skip those, but rather focus on the smaller files such as e.g. music, photos, word & excel documents, video clips (that are smaller in size) that are faster to encrypt. However ransomware is constantly evolving so that may change.
It's also worth noting that some use cases are more suited to using snapshots than others. So they may be appropriate for some shares on your NAS and not for others.
Alternatively, you can take a manual snapshot from time to time as it would not be pruned automatically. But you'd also need to remove the older manual snapshot after taking the new one, to avoid running into full volume.
@omicron_persei8 wrote: Alternatively, you can take a manual snapshot from time to time as it would not be pruned automatically. But you'd also need to remove the older manual snapshot after taking the new one, to avoid running into full volume.
Right - the main idea is to ensure the snapshot+main share can't overflow the available space. Manual snapshots accomplish that also, and let you run a bit fuller (near 50%).
