This is a bit of a convoluted review, so temporarily pretend I’m not a computer person! Here is my new Unifi UNAS Pro with four drives, sitting in a very nice rack from AudioRAX that I used to use for some audio gear. There’s a furman power conditioner on top which is acting like a blinged out power strip. Over on the right you see my Cloud Gateway (white) and a Hubitat, which is my home automation IOT controller for my various ZWave lamp plugs.
My use cases are a bit off what I think Unifi was aiming for (I think small and medium size businesses without any “devops”), and this unit completely works for me, but it’s only within the context of my use cases that I’m explaining it.
I used to work in the storage industry and from this perspective having a mostly appliance-quality NAS that is very quiet, affordable ($500 without drives) and mostly “easy” to set up is pretty interesting to me. The chasis are not super enterprisey but it seems high quality enough. The drives are spinning SATA disks.
Basically if you set one of these up, you’re going to get a lot (or a few) SMBFS shares with passwords, and you can optionally choose I think to send these backups to various cloud services. There is a control where you can limit the max size of the shares, but they all exist on one RAID volume, you don’t really set up multiple RAID volumes on this device. All disks go together, and odd numbers of disks have to be hot spares. I’m honestly not sure if it does RAID rebuilds if you add in even numbers of disks, but I suspect it does.
My use case was simply backing up a couple of MACs - where I could have instead gotten a few hard drives for time machine instead. However, I don’t really trust Time Machine - the reason being is it provides an interface to go back in time and “get” files but the on disk formats are kind of “magic”. I also kind of just wanted a new toy to play with.
When setting up the UNAS I would first recommend upgrading the firmware, which I did not do.
I got a bit stuck actually, I originally picked a RAID level and then decided during the build process to assign a DHCP reservation, which I think it was very unhappy to try to do. This may be a bit of a glitch because the system was new, but I don’t know. I ended up learning how to factory reset the box. Upon resetting, I found that it marked my drives incompatible when trying to choose a new RAID level, but eventually I figure something out (not sure what) and got it to commit to using the previous choice.
The UNAS Pro really wants you to buy drives from Unifi and I’m not sure it would work with drives that you buy outside. Somehow, upon my second go around, I didn't need to wait for the rebuild and could use all drives pretty much right off the bat.
To get a reliable share, you have to make a user account in the web interface. It looks like things do not require that you own any other Unifi hardware, but I’m not absolutely sure about that. I have the small Cloud Gateway of some kind. When you make a share, you can then give a user an email address, so I used “firstname+something@mydomain.com”. You then get an email to download the “Unifi Identity” application on Mac.
Now, it’s just an SMBFS share, right? Couldn’t I mount it without the Unifi Identity application? Well, yes, but the way to do that is to go into finder and add it by IP address. I’m not sure that works if the IP address of the appliance were to change, and I experienced some problems with that method. Letting the Identity application mount the drive results in two shares showing up in finder, one named after my “drive” and another named after the IP address - this is somewhat redundant but I’m ok with it.
From there, you can try to use it with Time Machine but I experienced a problem in using this where Time Machine kind of locked up in UI, I don’t think the NAS over WiFi is fast enough for the way Time Machine works, and it is perhaps problematic that Time Machine seems to create a disk image and then smbfs is file based. Can it even work that way at all? I don’t know.
I opted in on using Carbon Copy Cloner, installing the Identity application on two different Macs. Here, I can set up “jobs” that backup the computer weekly to one folder and then again monthly to another folder, so I have a way to get accidentally deleted files.
I can then also fairly easily use the drive to exchange information between computers, even going into the various backup folders.
You might be saying - do I need Carbon Copy Cloner or could I just use rsync? Here this is where I suggest my knowledge of rsync is perhaps decaying, but I experienced rsync -avz or -vz and multiple combinations eventually dying with closed sockets when using just the volume in /Volumes/ as a path address. Carbon Copy Cloner did not have these problems, but is definitely doing a “copy if changed, delete on remote if absent on source” if not. This is why in Carbon Copy Cloner you need multiple backups.
In all, I think the device is well made and can be set up successfully but perhaps because it’s new, you may have to use some intuition to figure some things out. There’s not a really clear “event log” in the UI, it seems to want to email you after you have turned that on, which doesn’t make a lot of sense considering the way I would expect it to work in enterprise applications.
On the other hand, I’m not a person who wants to admin any Linux boxes or do any extra work, so it’s nicely hands off in that regard.
I haven’t tried backing up the system to a cloud source, but I can see in a small business where this might be pretty nice - you have a fast local NAS but have disaster recovery offsite and so on.
The drives seem to stay doing something even with no backup activity, and don’t really spin down, I haven’t seen a setting about that yet.
My needs are actually pretty light - I mostly just care about my Lightroom catalog, so this is definitely overkill! But I also like that if I need to replace a computer, I won’t have too many problems, and I also get out of dealing with backup services like Backblaze and so on.
I do like what they have going on here, but if you’ve got a DevOps team, this may be a little basic for you. I also can’t really speak to how this might work with the various Unifi video cameras and other systems, as I don’t have those in my setup. I still really like their Wifi mesh setup shared in a previous post.