Backing up a NAS

Posted by: james n on 07 January 2010

At the moment all my music is stored on a 1Tb Infrant Ready NAS NV+. It's been very reliable with 1 replacement hardrive in 2 years of constant use. I'd like to keep an offsite backup of my collection - its just over 500Gb of AIFF files.

I bought a WD Elements 1Tb USB drive thinking this would be the easiest solution. What a PIA - backups fail and one of Macs can see it, the other can't so its going back.

I'm just looking for something thats Mac compatible, can plug in via USB (or even better via Ethernet) that i can backup the NAS every month or so, so if the worst happens its not a re-rip of my entire collection.

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

James

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by paremus

James

I'm using the MOZY service. It will take you a while to back up for the first time - depending upon your uplink speed (It will take me a couple of weeks) - but then I can forget about it.

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by james n

Thanks Richard - had a look at Mozy but i'm really looking for a physical backup i can take and leave elsewhere.

Cheers

James

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by badlyread

Hi James

I have 2 G-Technology 500Gb drives for the music stored on my Mac Mini. The drive I actually use is a mini which is powered by the firewire connection and is tiny! A normal G-Drive is used for the back up. Both are formatted for Mac and have been very reliable to date. Due to the aluminium construction they are quiet fanless and quiet. Worth a look.

Kind regards

Neil

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by kent

James,

Have you checked out computeraudiophile dot com website, there are some reviews for NAS. Not sure if those fit your need, but it is worth the investigations.

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by garyi

The trouble with cheap nases is that transfers of large amounts of data can often fail. It won't be the drive you sent back but the NAS you are using.

Probably the best way is to select say A-G of your music collection and copy that over then do another chunk.

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by gaet

Hello,

I have two QNAP 119 located at different places and use remote replication to sync their content. I don't know if this feature exists on your NAS but on mines it works perfect.
http://www.qnap.com/pro_application.asp?ap_id=134

Rgds,
Gaetan

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by james n

Thanks all - seem to have sorted it now after a bit more googling.

Garyi - a cheap NAS ? - what do you consider decent then ?

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by garyi

James there is not a lot on the consumer market for NASes that is anything other than a cheap little board with linux on and an ethernet socket. It is what it is.

ALthough I notice the ready nas seems to be the other end of the scale, bloody expensive.

It will be easy to proove me wrong, try it with another USB harddrive and see if you get a fail again

I use a droboshare, which all in all can only be classed as adequate, no more.

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by james n

Well apart from a failed Hard drive it's been very good (cue main board failure...). Backup should finish in about 2o hours so we'll see.

James

Posted on: 07 January 2010 by garyi

I am only speaking from experience. Once advantage of the drobo is I can take it off the network and plug it direct to a mac for really big file transfers.

Posted on: 08 January 2010 by james n

It worked - finally. My fault. A reformat of the external drive to EXT3 and a couple of paths set incorrectly sorted it. Music safe