Alternating drives in target NAS when backing up? Any advice?

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montybiggleswor wrote:

I am guessing whenever I switch the hard drives in the RN102 it will cause the RN104 to back up the whole volume again. I am wondering if there's a way of telling my RN104 what I am up to so it only backs up thing that changed since I last switched the discs rather than the whole volume.

The link to the garage is currently Ethernet over Mains which is pretty slow, we get about 20Mbps on a good day, I could add a wired Gigabit connection but I’d rather not and this would still take almost a day to backup the entire volume if I did.

If you use rsync for the backup job, it compares the source and destination, so it won't backup the whole volume again, just the difference.

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montybiggleswor wrote:

I am wondering how practical it would be to buy two more 3TB drives and caddys so that I can switch the drives every month in the RN102.
The theory is that if I had a virus that wiped out the whole network I could still recover my data and only loose changes in the last month.

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Let me suggest another way. Get a 6TB USB HDD, connect to the main NAS every now and then to perform your backup. To me, this seems less hassle and you achieve the same protection, and you don't need to go through the powerline adapters.

Some info about my backup plan (second part of the post + some more further down): https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS/My-recommendation-Don-t-use-ReadyCloud-user-home-shares/m-p/1258463#M127461

I perform backups to two external HDDs, that I rotate weekly (so fortnight back up to each external HDD).

I didn't want to have two USB enclosures and the mess that go with it, so I use bare HDDs stored in ESD protective packaging and have an "easy-swap" enclosure tethered to the NAS:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Icy-Box-3-5-Inch-Enclosure-USB3/dp/B003PHRQ16

http://www.raidsonic.de/products/external_cases/external_cases_35/index_en.php?we_objectID=469