How to use a NAS to automatically compress and archive old files
Australian households and small businesses generate a steady flood of digital files. Family photos from a holiday in Byron Bay, tax records held for the ATO's mandatory retention period, surveillance footage from a Brisbane shopfront, or a Plex media library in Adelaide can quickly consume tens of terabytes. Storing it on a single external drive is risky, while paying for an unbounded overseas cloud plan is expensive. A NAS sitting in the office or study offers a middle path: local control, redundancy, and the ability to automate compression so old material is quietly packed away.
Australia's Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, mandatory financial record rules, and the uneven upload speeds of the National Broadband Network all push local users toward keeping a primary copy of important data on premises. A NAS also avoids the variable monthly fees of consumer cloud services, which climb sharply when uploading hundreds of gigabytes of RAW photography or 4K video. The real value comes from teaching the device to manage the data itself.
Why automatic archiving matters for users in Australia
The amount of personal and business data generated in a typical Australian home has tripled in the last decade. A Sydney videographer may finish a wedding shoot and drop hundreds of gigabytes onto a workstation drive, only to leave it there for months. The same pattern holds for medical practices in Perth, or councils in Hobart archiving body-worn camera footage. Without a plan, the primary volume fills up, performance drops, and cleanup happens during a rushed weekend.
Automatic archiving solves three problems at once. It keeps the active volume responsive, it preserves data in a format readable years later, and it creates a predictable retention schedule. For a small Melbourne accounting firm, that might mean anything older than seven financial years is automatically moved to a compressed archive. For a Canberra hobbyist photographer, it might mean a monthly job that bundles finished projects, removes the originals, and writes a checksum log for later integrity checks.
Choosing the right NAS platform for scheduled compression
The two brands covered on WhichNAS.com, Synology and QNAP, both ship with enough tooling to handle unattended archiving, but the path differs slightly. Synology's DSM offers Hyper Backup, Snapshot Replication, and a built-in archive utility that can target USB drives, remote rsync servers, or cloud buckets. QNAP's QTS and QuTS hero ship with Hybrid Backup Sync and a flexible App Center that supports the same open standards, plus a dedicated archive tier on supported units.
For regional users where spare parts can take days to arrive, RAID 1 or RAID 5 on a four-bay enclosure is the usual starting point. SSDs can be added later as a read cache to keep photo libraries responsive while mechanical drives handle compression. Power consumption matters in Australia, where electricity prices rank among the highest in the developed world, so a Celeron or ARM-based unit idling around ten watts will save several hundred dollars a year compared to a desktop tower running 24/7.
Setting up scheduled compression on Synology and QNAP
The most reliable approach is through the operating system's task scheduler paired with a small script. On Synology, open Control Panel, head to Task Scheduler, and create a triggered task that runs as root. The job is usually a shell script using the built-in tar and zstd utilities to bundle a folder, apply Zstandard compression, and write the result to a designated volume with a date-stamped name. Local time zones are worth noting: a task set for 02:00 on a Synology in Queensland will fire at a different wall-clock time for someone in Adelaide after daylight saving.
QNAP users have two options. The graphical approach runs through HBS3, where a sync job can compress files on the fly before they leave the source share. The scripted approach mirrors Synology: install Entware through the App Center, then use the same tar | zstd pipe. Either way, the schedule should match the rate of new data. A Brisbane media studio generating around 200 GB of finished projects a week might run the job nightly, while a one-person Geelong consultancy could run it monthly.
Building a tiered archive with cold storage
A single NAS is rarely enough for serious archival work. A common pattern in Australian small businesses is to pair the main unit with a second, lower-power enclosure dedicated to cold storage. The primary NAS handles day-to-day writes, runs the media server, and exposes shares over SMB to the office. Once a week or month, a job on the primary pushes compressed archives to the cold unit over the local network, where they sit on larger, slower drives in a mirrored configuration.
For those with a fast NBN connection, an offsite tier can be added through an Australian cloud provider, keeping data within the country for sovereignty and reducing latency. The compression job writes locally first, then copies the result to the cloud bucket during off-peak hours. A two-bay unit set up in a back room is enough to hold several years of compressed archives if the compression ratio is reasonable, making the tiered structure affordable for a suburban family or a regional medical clinic.
Compression formats, retention, and long-term readability
The format chosen for the archive has long-term consequences. ZIP is universally readable but offers modest compression. 7z, using LZMA2, typically achieves 30 to 50 percent better ratios at the cost of CPU time. Zstandard, increasingly supported on modern NAS operating systems, hits a sweet spot: faster than 7z, denser than gzip, and available as a single static binary for both Synology and QNAP. For text-heavy archives such as email exports, the difference between ZIP and Zstandard can mean the difference between 60 GB and 28 GB on disk.
| Format | Typical ratio | Encoding speed | Decoder availability | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZIP (deflate) | 1.0–1.5x | Fast | Universal | Readable anywhere, lowest density |
| gzip | 1.1–1.6x | Fast | Universal on Linux | Pairs with tar for most pipelines |
| 7z (LZMA2) | 1.6–2.4x | Slow | Common, needs 7-Zip or p7zip | Best density, high CPU cost |
| Zstandard | 1.4–2.0x | Very fast | Growing, included in DSM and QTS | Strong balance for NAS workloads |
| RAR | 1.4–2.0x | Medium | Closed source, limited on Linux | Hard to recommend for new archives |
A retention policy should be written down, even if it lives in a single text file inside the archive. A reasonable starting point for most Australian households is to keep the last three monthly archives, the last four quarterly archives, and a single annual archive going back as far as storage allows. Businesses subject to the Privacy Act should add the retention periods required by their sector. A scheduled script can prune anything older than the policy, with a dry-run mode for the first few months so the operator can confirm the logic before anything is deleted for good.
Monitoring, integrity checks, and recovery drills
An archive that has never been tested is not really an archive. Both Synology and QNAP include built-in S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, scheduled scrubbing for RAID arrays, and notification rules that can email or push alerts to a phone. Adding a monthly checksum job that walks the archive directory, computes SHA-256 hashes, and compares them to a stored manifest will catch silent corruption on drives that are beginning to fail. Installers in Perth and Darwin often recommend extra cooling for enclosures sitting in non-airconditioned rooms, since Australian summer temperatures can push drive operating temps above 45 °C, accelerating wear.
Recovery drills should run at least once a year. Pick a random archived folder, copy the compressed file to a different machine, decompress it, and confirm the contents match what was originally written. For a small business in Launceston, that exercise can be folded into a quiet afternoon. For a media agency with terabytes of footage, a quarterly drill is worth the time. The whole point of an automated archive is that it is trusted without daily attention, and trust is earned by actually using the restore path.
For step-by-step walkthroughs of RAID layouts, SSD caching, and the Synology versus QNAP comparison, the rest of WhichNAS.com has detailed guides for both beginners and experienced administrators. The site's archive also covers older material on related infrastructure, including elevator installation and maintenance for buildings that once housed data rooms, useful context for those planning a dedicated server closet.