NAS Backup plan

[aposti]

Hi, I'm looking for some piece of advise.

I'm looking to buy a NAS device to store my family pictures and videos. A pretty simple and common use case.

I first thought of buying a 2-bay device so I can set up a RAID 1 so if one hard drive dies my files would be safe in the second.

But after really thinking it (and reading) I agree that RAIDs are not a good backup plan.

I have been researching different brands (Synology, QNAP, LaCie, Asustor) and all claim to be able to backup the NAS in another NAS or DAS.

However, based on what I've understood, what they actually do is just mirror the NAS drive into the other NAS/DAS. The problem that I see is that mirroring is not a good backup solution. If it was OK, then I could just use a RAID 1, with the two drives mirroring.

I think that what I'm looking for is a backup software such as Apple's Time Machine, or Crashplan -that allow to manage versions and history of the files- that could actually be installed and run in the NAS itself.

The way I'm willing to use the device is upload the files to the NAS (through a shared folder or even a cloud setup) and have the NAS manage the versioning and backup. I don't want the backup software to run on my computer.

As simple and trivial as my use case sounds, I wasn't able to find anything that really fits my needs.

Am I completely wrong?

Thanks in advance for your adivce

 

[damai7788]

Hi Aposti,

I agreed with you.
I still looking for best practice backup for NAS.

I plan to do full backup on weekly or monthly basis,
and differential backup on daily basis.
And save the daily backup to individual folder so I can have many sets of backup.

I plan to run the backup software from the PC/Windows.

Using xcopy with the date filter don't solve the problem, because when copying a whole folder into NAS, the date won't change. The files inside the folder will have their original date.

Using standard backup program which only backup files with 'a' attribut don't work, because my NAS (WD/Buffalo/Thecus) have problem in manipulating archive attribute.

I found this program:
http://tp.lc.ehu.es/jma/win32/dirco.html
It can do directory compare and save the difference to another folder.
So we can have many sets of backup.

I haven't test it a lot.

Any other idea?

Thanks.

 

[stevech]

Synology or QNAP. My Synology DS212 (2 bay). Two 2TB drives. NOT RAID. Two volumes. Two independent file systems. Time Backup from one to the other volume. And as well, backup to USB3 external drive (not NTFS for speed)

 

[damai7788]

Synology or QNAP. My Synology DS212 (2 bay). Two 2TB drives. NOT RAID. Two volumes. Two independent file systems. Time Backup from one to the other volume. And as well, backup to USB3 external drive (not NTFS for speed)

Hi Stevech,

Thanks for your confirmation.

Using one volume in one hdd configuration, in jbod config, can we easily put the hdd into windows computer and install ext2/ext3 file system reader utility, then we can read the data and copy it out? I haven't tried this before.

Backup from NAS to USB port, what file system do you use for best result/speed?
I just tried from Thecus N2200 EVO USB port to USB Flash Disk formatted in NTFS,copy one 335 MB file,
NAS to Flash Disk, took about 90 seconds, so it will took about 3 days to copy out 1 TB of data.
Flash Disk to NAS, took about 60 seconds.

I havent tried to copy to external usb hdd.

Thanks.

 

[stevech]

2 bay.
RAID not, JBOD not.
Volume per disk, IMO.
One volume backed up to the the other (or at least key folders). And/or Time Backup from one to the other. I do both.

My USB3 drive and enclosure.. is name brand. Some enclosures don't do drive spin down right with NASes. I have 3 or so and only 1 works right. It's trial and error.
I began with NTFS on the USB3 since Linux drivers for writing NTFS improved. But after a while, I found a utility for Win 7 64bit that works well for reading native NAS format ext4. That's much faster than NTFS on the NAS.

I do have SSD drives but they're too expensive to use for backup only. IMO. It's about 80 cents per gigabyte now. I have only Samsung SSDs.

My NAS has an SD card slot. I have a 32GB there and use it for yet another backup of VVIP folders. I have another really old 1 drive NAS hidden away, on the LAN, for VVIP backups too. Financial info all encrypted using SafeHouse software.

Call me too conservative, which some friends/relatives do, but in my long life with computers, I've never lost data at work or at home.