RN102 and Active Directory domain

The answer on backup is yes.

thanks for your quick reply.
and what about Windows domain AD support ?

Thanks

The web UI supports it, but I have not tried it.

The AD auth works (at least with server 2012 R1), setup is simple, all users and groups are shown and you can set rights on shares as if they were local users. local users are disabled if AD is enabled. Netgear chose to display rights by share on the interface, so you'll have to set the rights from a windows computer going into the folder properties if you want per folder rights and not per share.
I believe the OS6 is the same for all the Netgear device, pro or not, so every function is available for everyone. You got an interface to backup shares. Rsync is a sharing method which is supported, you can use it over SSH too. If you want per folder backup, you'll have to drop into SSH to do it though.
Netgear has a built in NAS replicate feature, but I don't know if this is available for old devices or only between OS6 devices.

I also have to say that some users are experiencing problems with OS6 stability causing transfer crash and device lock up (solved only by waiting for hours or doing a power cycle) when you do heavy write on the device, an update is to be released soon to fix this. I advise to wait for 6.1.5 or 6.2 update before buying. It seems to be a pure software problem related to BTRFS, so I assume this should be fully solved with the update, but until it's fixed I cannot recommend the device for professional use. But since there are rumors of the update coming in by mid-december...

For the choice of the NAS, the RN102/RN104 may be limited in speed. I personally get 100MBytes/s in read speed and 40MBytes/s in write.
My setup SMB over gigabit network, RN104 with 4*4Tb seagate NAS HDD and the client is a computer with I7-2600K, 16Gb RAM and 2*WD7502AAEX raid 0 under windows server 2012.
Those speeds are enough for a small environnement but I advise to get a more powerful device (RN3xx/RN5xx ?) if you have more than 5 simultaneous people on it.

The RN514 is similar in performance to the PROs you already have. The RN314 is similar to an ultra.

I agree that the RN100 line is not a great choice if you have a lot of simultaneous users. It's write speed is also about 1/2 that of the faster models.

xeltros wrote:

I also have to say that some users are experiencing problems with OS6 stability causing transfer crash and device lock up (solved only by waiting for hours or doing a power cycle) when you do heavy write on the device, an update is to be released soon to fix this. I advise to wait for 6.1.5 or 6.2 update before buying. It seems to be a pure software problem related to BTRFS, so I assume this should be fully solved with the update, but until it's fixed I cannot recommend the device for professional use. But since there are rumors of the update coming in by mid-december...

thanks for info Xeltros & StephenB

The goal is simply for us to have an external backup : ReadNAS Pro BE ===> backup using RSYNC to ===> RN102 on the LAN. As soon as the backup is finished the RN102 goes in another physical place than the RedayNAS Pro. We wish to do that once a quarter. The RN102 would be used only for external backup, no user access.

Then is it a good hardware choice ? If yes, as xeltroys said, we will wait for 6.2 release because the stability transfer is critical !! :cry:

thanks,

AS I understand you do a full backup that's not updated after by network, that's only a backup copy for disaster recovery, an USB drive (with raid1) wouldn't be enough ? or you want to be able to get up and running without performing a restore ?
For a backup, you should be able to backup 8Tb (NAS max size) in less than 3 months without problem so I guess the Hardware is enough. With a speed of 40MBytes/s it should take around 56hours for 8Tb if I didn't mess up with the numbers. But I guess you'll have raid1, so it should be half the size and take half the time, 28H. If you want to do it overnight, then you may want to get a better NAS. if 28Hours is ok, then I don't see why upgrading.
If you plan to have more and more data or if you want more security, the 104 is not much more expensive but has 2 disks slots more than the 102. With more space you can have more snapshots too and create some kind of history of the files.

Otherwise, any NAS should be able to deal with your needs except those designed to be USB drives with cloud features or really old models without gigabit NIC. Rsync is a common file transfer protocol for NAS, the rsync compatibility is shown in every serious site. You may then want to look at the warranty since Netgear has a 3 year warranty over the 102/104 I recall (checking advised though).

PS : Depending on you backup abilities and data sensitivity and volatility, once a quarter seems to be a long time.
I was tought to get a full backup once a week and incremental backups once a day. Since you have already a mirrored NAS, I believe that once every two weeks would be enough, maybe once a month but once every 3 month... I'm always considering the worst case scenario, so are you able to get back to work with 3 month old data ?
Perhaps you have a pretty good idea of your needs and once a quarter is enough, in that case please ignore the remark but since I do not know anything about you or your company, I prefer to warn.

The RN102 is suitable for backing up the Pro - I use it that way in my home setup (though daily, not quarterly). If the backups are incremental, you probably won't be writing anywhere close to 4 TB. But I also don't think you'll get 40 Mbytes/sec average throughput - that is the max throughput for large files transfer. So backup times for a quarterly backup are a bit hard to gauge.

I'd also suggest that you do a scrub on the RN102 when the backup completes (or use some other tool to access all the files) - just to make sure there are no disk issues.

Other alternatives for disaster recovery include backing it up to a USB drive (for best performance connect the USB drive to a PC and back up over the network), and Cloud backup (Crashplan is what I use).

CrashPlan can be fairly easily installed on a pro, and is quite inexpensive. I get a backup speed of about 1.5 Mbyte/sec (more or less) though the de-duplication can make the effective speed faster than that. If you go with CrashPlan I suggest uplifting the stock memory on the Pro to at least 2 GB.

xeltros wrote:
AS I understand you do a full backup that's not updated after by network, that's only a backup copy for disaster recovery, an USB drive (with raid1) wouldn't be enough ?

Its more expensive to buy an usb3 dd than a 2 bays NAS ! And i can use RSYNC with Nas. With the 2 bays NAS no need to have RAID1. I must use the full capacity : 2x4to = 8to. It will be use only for recovery after a disaster.

I am very worried about stability with OS6.

thanks

Not sure where you are shopping, but in the US USB 3.0 hard drives are cheaper than a 2-bay NAS. 4 TB USB 3.0 drives can be purchased for $150 - so you can get 8 TB for ~$300. A 2-bay RN102 NAS with 8TB of storage costs ~$500.

You can use jbod with the RN102. I've found it to be stable in that configuration for a while now (I haven't seen the lockups that other people have experienced). Though of course OS6 still has a way to go.