Backing up the NAS drive

Hi Robert

I use 2 NAS drives on the same wired network and run incremental backups on them twice a week. Modern NAS drives (e.g. QNAP or Synology) have backup software that allows you to schedule these routine operations.  Mine run automatically in the early hours of the morning.

A wired connection may well be better than wireless due to the large volume of data that can flow between the drives.  The first back-up takes hours, if not a day, depending on how many Terabytes of data that you have stored on there.

Alternatively, you can plug an external USB hard drive into the NAS drive and copy the files over.  I'm not sure if/how you can run incremental back-ups this way though.  Others may know more.

You are absolutely right to want a back up though.  I have had one NAS drive throw a wobbly, at which point the back-up was a god send.  Simply mirroring 2 hard drives in the same NAS drive is not good enough, as both drives can be fried if the main control board or power supply board fail in the NAS itself.

Hope this helps, FT

I back my NAS seperate drive, use Segate seperate Disk - would strongly advise this is done on a regular basis - set the back up and let it run - 

Hi Robert,

the short answer is "Yes", and is something you should be doing now as a matter of course. Ideally, you would keep the backup at a different location, just to be absolutely safe.

you don't give the make & model of NAS that you use, but most should have their own backup utilities which should make life easy for you. My Synology DS212 has an excellent backup utility. I would expect any Synology or Qnap to have something similar.

I simply back up to a standard WD external drive (just make sure its capacity will cope with the size of your NAS drive). If you have 2 mirrored drives, you will only be backing up a single drive.

Good luck.

Robert .. I think it's a general law that everything wears out eventually .. and yes, your friend is right.  

I back up my NAS to an external hard drive connected via a USB cable.  It's easy, quick and clean.  You need to do it as soon as possible.  

The term "wear out", though correct, needs to be augmented with the term "may break" .. the weakest part of your NAS are the disk drives and, even though their reliability has improved dramatically over the years, these are usually the part of a NAS that goes bad first.  

John.

I have a QNAP TS-212P (2x3TB)

Thanks, all

I back up from the NAS to an external USB drive. My NAS has less than 1/2 TB so i have not invested in more elaborate solutions.

I avoid the standard Window copy-pasting as this is not incremental and also i run to issues when it comes to long file names etc. In the beginning i backed up my NAS using a simple linux script (the advantage is that you can issue the script command connected via wifi but the script runs locally between NAS and USB without sending the data to the PC and therefore is fast).

Now that my NAS vendor does not allow root access i cannot use this anymore so i have resorted to the next best alternative: a ROBOCOPY windows script with the PC wired to the switch where the NAS is connected to. This is reliable, fast, does not have file length limitations and -most important- it is incremental using the available command options: Robocopy %source% %target% /e /XO /np /tee /z /mt:4 /LOG:%Logname%)

Of course the above is a bit perverse, a second NAS will do the job fine... i guess i will eventually end up there myself...

Its been a lot of years since I had a qnap, but even way back when you could plug a USB hd into and it would be detected and you could set that as a back up drive to happen on a regular schedule, not sure that command link scripts etc are needed?

I have a very basic Seagate NAS which can be configured to be used as back up drive itself but not to back up its contents elsewhere.

Most NAS devices have a built in routine to backup to a USB drive connected to the NAS.  You should also consider multiple backups - 2 or 3 is ideal: one maybe two which you keep at home and a third which you store at a remote location such as desk drawer at work, a friends home or if you don't have access to either of those then a bank security box.

And its not just "wearing out" or "breaking" that you have to worry about with a NAS:  A NAS running RAID only protects you against particular types of problems - that is individual drives dying.  Most issues requiring access to backups are caused by other issues such as user error and operating system errors.

I back up my NAS music share to a USB portable hard drive using MS SyncToy every so often (usually when I've ripped a few CDs to the NAS).

If I had to escape my flat I could in theory pop the portable USB drive into a pocket. More organised people on the forum store their back-up drives away from their home.

The notion that you should back up your NAS is 100% correct.

For additional security you could also backup the complete NAS or selected folders to a cloud based server thus keeping a copy away from your home. Although if you lost your home your first concern would unlikely be your music collection. It would also take quite a while to upload or restore the files over the Internet but at least they would be there.

When I first started keeping my music files on a NAS, I decided to keep TWO backups of them.   When I was still using a Windoze PC I used a program called SyncBack Pro, which would 'mirror' (i.e. update the backup to be the same as the NAS) the NAS contents on to the external hard drive.  Now I've 'gone Mac' I use a similar program called Chronosync to do the same job.  I keep one of the backups in our house, and the other at my daughter's house.  When I update the NAS contents, I make a copy, take it to my daughter, and reclaim the one she is keeping so that I can update that.

I now have well in excess of 3TB of FLAC files, so loss of the original rips  would be a bit of a disaster.   Go for the belt and braces approach, IMO.

For Windows doing incremental changes to external hard drives there is a useful utility ( small cost ) called Beyond Compare which makes the process very quick. This will allow you to add just the new or edited changes to the external hard drive. But as mentioned, the first time doing the back up, I strongly suggest you wire the drive as it will take a long time.

Also investing in 'good' hard drives will help with the longevity - although they can fail - hence the need for back up, and a good NAS shell ( with 1+GB RAM), stable shelf and air flow around the device are also important.

I have a couple of WD NAS which run my music.  They back up overnight using the free PTReplicator program to a couple of old external hard drives hanging off an old XP laptop.  Not elegant and one day I'll improve it.  But it works and it uses up some old kit which would otherwise be in the loft

Dungassin posted:

When I first started keeping my music files on a NAS, I decided to keep TWO backups of them.   When I was still using a Windoze PC I used a program called SyncBack Pro, which would 'mirror' (i.e. update the backup to be the same as the NAS) the NAS contents on to the external hard drive.  Now I've 'gone Mac' I use a similar program called Chronosync to do the same job.  I keep one of the backups in our house, and the other at my daughter's house.  When I update the NAS contents, I make a copy, take it to my daughter, and reclaim the one she is keeping so that I can update that.

I now have well in excess of 3TB of FLAC files, so loss of the original rips  would be a bit of a disaster.   Go for the belt and braces approach, IMO.

Unfortunately a 'mirror' isn't the same as a backup:  For instance, if you accidentally delete a file and your "backup" is actually a mirror, then the mirror will also dutifully delete its copy as well and you'll have lost the file.

I use an off board samsung 2tb hdd to back up my synology 2tb raid configured nas. While raid will help if a hdd fails, it wont be much good in the event of a lightning strike. This thought occured to me one night shortly after getting the nas, and feeling rather smug with my two wd red drives. The following day I went and bought the samsung drive and its kept offline in a drawer in my office. Back up is easy with synology back up program.

Another SyncToy user. This allows incremental backups to a usb drive which I keep in the boot of my car.

I have a second NAS drive on the network which switches on overnight for 2 hours. 

Using the NAS to NAS backup software on the main NAS it syncs our music, photos and other important data over. I also have snapshots enabled which takes care of any mishaps should I delete a file accidentally, I can go back a year.

Both NAS drives have 4 disks in raid 5 configuration. The main NAS is a Qnap 453-pro and the backup is a Netgear Readynas 104.

Music I have purchased and other files (photos etc.) are also backed up daily to some blob storage provisioned on Microsoft Azure using the Qnap Azure storage application. This storage is inexpensive for data at rest and provides the offsite backup. I will shortly start to add my CD rips.

The beauty of this approach is that everything is automatic, so it gets done every day without fail and any issues are notified by email.

Richard

Huge - that's what I want and expect a mirror to do.  If it wasn't a mirror, then I would have to manually delete any double entries, as would happen should I change a file name.  I've never tested it, but I assume that if I updated a music file by changing the metadata (a not infrequent occurrence), then an ordinary backup would have the original file AND the updated one, which is totally undesirable.

I should have added that I keep a third ordinary backup (not mirror on a partition on the same 6TB thunderbolt drive which I use for a Time Machine backup.  This backup I manage manually (not with Chronosync) by manually copying new files from my NAS onto the FLAC directory on the Thunderbolt drive. That gives me the security of a backup should I accidentally delete a music file.  Don't seem to have managed to do that yet!

A very DIRTY, unmentioned secret that many NAS units perform a script that renders the single, dual, or quad drives [useless] outside of their resident boxes.  As an example, I have a ReadyNas by Netgear V1, 
and if I wanted to, (which I did), to take the drive out & put in an external USB based eSata box to have
the supposed, unrestricted WAV files read by my PC...NOPE!  In theory, a linux code can be written to allow
you to read these files, but I have had a group of IT, coding professionals try, and gave up!  Netgear was less than useless.  So, WHEN my unit dies, the only hope to to find an OLDER unit to read my 2 TB of music files.
By the way, the newer unit from NetGear (updated version), with different processor, will NOT read the files.
How do you like those apples!  I check with Qnap, and they told me their systems operate similarly.  I spoke to an exec at Synology at this past CES show, and his claim is that by loading a readily available Linux applet, you can indeed, take a drive out of their units, and use in an external USB box.  SO, everyone should be dutifully cautious of backup , raid claims that say your data is safe!

And to the original post, while my Ready Nas V1 has an USB (2.0) out, on the back, it never seemed to ever work to allow for a painfully slow back up.  I tried with External WD drives, small USB sticks, and most recently a dual slot, eSata-USB box, loaded with 2TB WD Red drives.  The box works fine on my PC
with Win 7, and my Mac

Expecting to directly mount a disk from one OS on  another is a little excessive.  Try taking a MAC OS X Extended format disk out of a Mac, connect it inside a PC and see what happens!

Incidentally Windows is unusual as it has particularly good backward compatibility, for instance, a modern Windows can still read FAT disks from the old MS-DOS days, if you still have the hardware!

I use the WD My Passport 2TB USB drives. You can plug it in the back of the Synology and set up an incremental backup to run once a week or whatever. You do this via 'backup and replication' in the Synology. There's no need to format the drive or anything - just plug it in, give it a name, tell it what to do and off it goes. 

I periodically do an incremental backup as well onto a 2 TB dedicated external drive.  Of course the original backup took quite a long time but the incremental is not long at all - I can only assume it works inasmuch as I have never done a restore!

This leads me to a companion question: I currently use a Vortexbox running SB Server for my streaming.  Does anyone know how useful or not that backup would be in the event I were to use a different product as my NAS or as my NAS/streaming software?