Over the years I've made attempts to tidy up and improve on my how I manage and back up data across my various devices, and while things are a little better, I think I can do much better.  I'm hoping there might be some good suggestions or advice from the GZ community.

 - I currently have a single bay QNAP NAS, which was fine to get started about 8 years ago, but really doesn't cut the mustard now.  It has a 4TB WD Red drive, which is about a third full.

 - I am quite embedded with Onedrive (as is my wife) - we pay $165/year for 1TB storage for up to five accounts, and each of those accounts has access to the full Office 365 suite, which suits us nicely.  For the most part, we are happy with Onedrive, though occasionally finding and retrieving data (e.g. a photo) using the web interface can be a mission (to say the least).  But value for storage and services is hard to beat.  I have used just over half of my 1TB allocation.

 - I have a Surface Pro 3 as my main PC.  With 256GB storage, it limits how much I can sync from Onedrive to my Surface.  My wife has a full blown desktop PC, so has no such limit.

When I last reviewed how I was going to set things up, I came up with the following structure:

1. All my personal files (as opposed to those I "shared" with my wife - family photos, videos, music collections, etc) were in Onedrive in the expected folder groups (Docs, Music, Pictures, Videos).  These were selectively synced to my Surface Pro 3 (selectively, as there isn't enough space on the SP3 to hold all my Onedrive files).

2. My Onedrive was "backed up" to the QNAP NAS using the Cloud Drive Sync app on the NAS.  This meant that when I was on my home network, I was able to easily access the full content of my Onedrive as a mapped drive on my SP3.

3. The entirety of my NAS was backed up to iDrive (Crashplan, until they ended their non-Commercial service), providing a level of redundancy against my NAS failing.

This was all set up based around my data setup, but the idea was that my wife would also migrate to a similar setup (eventually, when we had time to migrate things over).  So we would each have a separate account on the NAS where were stored our own personal files, synced to our separate Onedrive accounts for on-the-go access (and in my wife's case, also fully synced to her home PC for local access), with the whole NAS backed up to iDrive for redundancy against data loss.  In effect, this would be a second level of protection, in that all important files would already be in Onedrive.

The reason I'm re-looking at all this, is that while this sounds reasonably good (to me, at least), it doesn't work smoothly.  Onedrive can be slow at times, and syncing Onedrive to the NAS is reliant on an app on the NAS which doesn't seem to work all the time.  I checked on things recently and found a bunch of files that weren't syncing.  Without doing a long and complicated audit, (which I can't/don't really want to commit the time to) I don't really know how much hasn't been synced.  Also, the backup from the NAS to iDrive seems to not work reliably.  I'm not sure if this is to do with iDrive or the NAS (or both), but it's worrying to not know how reliable is my back up.

Thoughts

I think the Onedrive to SP3 idea is okay.  I'm using the Onedrive functions built into W10 as a pretty safe way of syncing what I really need to have offline.  I can live with some stuff not being available on my SP3 offline.  If all my Onedrive files are available on the NAS, then making use of the mapped network drives is fine by me.

I think a NAS is pretty crucial.  But I wonder whether I need to look at something a bit better than the one-bay QNAP I've got.  A multi-bay NAS would be more expandable over time, obviously, and I understand that Intel-based hardware is faster when it comes to running some apps on the NAS.  But while shiny new hardware is nice, I don't know if that's the most important thing to fix.  Are other NAS better when it comes to syncing to a cloud service like Onedrive?  Or should I be looking at a different approach than NAS-Onedrive syncing?

Backing up the NAS gives me extra assurance of being able to recover data that might be lost.  It also recognises that Onedrive is a cloud storage, not a cloud backup service.  I like the idea of set and forget, rather than backing up to an external drive that I store at another location (which requires me to remember to do something on a regular basis - I don't know that I would be able to keep up that routine).  iDrive seemed a good option at the time - it had an app for my NAS, and the introductory offer for 2TB of storage was hard to beat.  But if the backup isn't reliable, then it's no value at all.  I've looked at things like Amazon S3, but the pricing is commercial-oriented and a bit hard to fathom.  Something like Crashplan for Small Business might be okay, but I'm not sure if they do backup from NAS natively, or if you have to do it via mapped network drives (like Crashplan Home used to require).  I guess the question here is firstly - with the rest of my setup, is backing up the NAS to a cloud storage service a good idea?  And if it is, then what's the best way to back it up?  Complicating things, it seems like native back up from within the NAS (set and forget) might be dependent on the NAS I have (which is why I'm wondering whether I should be looking at upgrading my hardware).  If a new/better NAS will make things a lot easier, then I'm prepared to pay for that, but if the problems are there no matter which NAS I use, then maybe I need to look at my overall setup.

Apologies for the rambling thoughts/questions.  It's a bit like trying to unpick the Gordian knot.  There a lots of things to balance - best value for money, reliable set ups with minimal maintenance, simple to use, etc.  Basically, I'm hoping that someone might be able to either validate some of the things I'm thinking about, or suggest some things to improve.