Iomega Prestige 2TB not detected by ReadyNAS NV+

Can you try to reformat it to FAT then check if it will be detected under volume settings. In the event that the drive will detected, try to reformat it to EXT3 on frontview.

Really weird. Tonight I took the Iomega and created folder names on it to match those that were on the older 500GB NTFS formatted WD drive. I then plugged the Iomega back to the NAS and found that under Volumes the USB storage was now detected and crucially the backup is now running.

That is good. Be advised, however, that if you have the opportunity to reformat it to FAT32 or EXT3 in the future, it will perform the backup faster. The routine for CIFS to NTFS is not as efficient as to the other two file formats. Of course the big advantage of either NTSF or FAT32 is that is can be directly read by Windows. Of course as you have now discovered, moving terrabytes of information across USB will take a long while. Not something you want to do on a frequent basis.

With that much data, you might want to see about a second NAS. I was running a single NV+ for three years, working up to about 600GB of data. I upgraded by adding a new NVX (now discontinued in favor of the Ultra 4) and at the suggestion of a few other members of the forum, used my NV+ as a backup target. Backups that used to take hours (I would only update the backup of media, it was 400+ GB so took forever to back up) became minutes. Once you have your initial backup done NAS to NAS, using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) you switch the method from FTP to rsync and it only takes minutes to synchronize the files share by share on the two machines. In addition, if something happens to one machine (fan, drive, PSU, whatever) you can still run off the backup. Although expensive, NAS to NAS is the only way to go when you measure your data in terrabytes. (My volume is now up to 1.7TB. Video sure eats up the drive space.)

Thanks for the feedback.
I wanted redundancy to protect again fire as well as hardware failure so my backup strategy is as follows:-

Saturday both home laptops backup to the NAS (4x 1TB - RAID X).
Sunday mornings the 2TB USB drive is retreived from the garage at the end of the garden and connected to the NAS
Full backup of NAS to 2TB USB drive every 4 weeks on a Sunday. Each Sunday in between is an incremental backup.
Once the 2TB USB has been backed up it is returned to the garage in an unmarked cardboard box before the end of the Sunday.

Advantage with the above is:-
- If there is a fire in the house or the garage the data is safe.
- If there is a theft in the house or the garage the data is safe.

I'm not fussed about how fast the backup is. Yes, you could have two Nas' but I would want the second one in the garage and then this would need networking to the one in the house. The above is I feel pretty resilient and reasonably cost effective. Our NAS is used to store mainly our music and photos which makes having a central repository for multiple machines an ideal solution to avoid duplication but have the redudancy required.

Thoughts, feedback on the above would be most welcome.

Sounds like you have the bases covered.