FrontView ReadyNAS To ReadyNAS Backups

nhelder wrote:
1a) Is there any compatibility issues or things I should be aware of when doing a FrontView sync between the two ReadyNAS devices?

frontview backup will abort on a dropped connection, other than that I am not thinking of anything.

nhelder wrote:
1b) The Pro 6 has 8tb of capacity, but only 5 is used... so I assume the backup process would still work fine backing up the 5tb of data to the 6tb of space on the Ultra 2?

Yes, the backup should still work fine, with the obvious impact of losing the full volume if a disk fails.

nhelder wrote:
3) Another option that could be used would to back up by LUN... is there any support for "snapshotting" a LUN from one ReadyNAS device directly to another?

Is the pro-6 running xraid-2? You can backup volumes or folders separately.

nhelder wrote:
4) Are there any other concerns or perhaps all-together different approaches I might want to consider for this particular situation?

Probably you want to use rsync for this. the pro-2 has built in support for rsync over ssh, the ultra doesn't (though there is a community add-ons for that). You probably want to do the original backup with the units on the same LAN (using NFS) to get it done faster.

You could also use CrashPlan, storing one Crashplan backup in the cloud and a second on the backup NAS. That would probably deal with dropped connections better, and also give you deduplication and compression. Note you can use CrashPlan to archive to the second NAS using their free plan, though the unlimited crashplan+ is pretty inexpensive, and gets you a second disaster recovery option if you need it.