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USB HDD used as destination for Backup of 314 / use old NAS instead?
I purchased a Seagate Expansion 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STBV3000100)
few years back to serve as my destination to backup my RN314. I plugged it into the front port of my NAS and while I am able to back up to it, it only recognizes 2 TB of space.
1. Have I done something that limited my NAS to recognizing only 2TB.
2. Assuming I fix that, or the NAS OS is capable of larger destination drives, what is maximum supported?
I currently only back up with shares and not my timemachine (a decision made mainly about space). I recently began a vertical upgrade of space on my NAS, because my Shares grew. I am now backup up only 3 of 4 shares. The data on the 4th is replaceable with a little effort.
As an asude, I still have the chassis of my old ReadyNAS NV+ can I fill it with retired HDD from my upgrade and use it as a backup destination? EIther place it offsite and backup over the net (might be too slow) or bring it onsite once a week and store it off site?
I am thinking you formatted the USB drive on the NAS, likely using the EXT format that Mac and Windows doesn't recognize. I think there was a bug a while back that would account for the loss of space.
I don't see much point in using a drive format that you can only read on the NAS. Generally I think NTFS is the best option, so I'd reformat it on the PC. Then you'd be able to read/write to the drive from windows, and read from it on a Mac. You might need to delete the partitions ("volumes") using Windows Disk Manager first, and then create a new partition that fills the whole disk.
As far as the max size goes, a lot of the very large USB drives (5TB and up) use SMR technology. These might cause some issues with the NAS. There's no easy way to tell if a large USB drive uses SMR or not - the specs generally don't say. One approach is to get a powered USB enclosure + an internal drive - then you will know the drive specs.
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JustKJ wrote:
As an asude, I still have the chassis of my old ReadyNAS NV+ can I fill it with retired HDD from my upgrade and use it as a backup destination? EIther place it offsite and backup over the net (might be too slow) or bring it onsite once a week and store it off site?
You can, keeping in mind that the NV+ is limited to 2 TB disks.
There used to be a free rsync-over-ssh add-on for the NV+, but I am not seeing it now. You could use a VPN - that could potentially be hosted in the two routers, or in PCs on each site. ZeroTier and OpenVPN are two options there.
JustKJ wrote:
I plugged it into the front port of my NAS and while I am able to back up to it, it only recognizes 2 TB of space.
If you attach the disk to a windows PC and look at it with the Windows Disk Manager, what partitions do you see?
Thanks stephen for the quick response.
When I look at the drive through the NAS interface, it shows a max of 2TB (SMB protocal). I use to be able to connect directly to my Mac and see the files or use a Virtual Machince PC see it, but when I connected it just now, my Mac responded that it was in an unreadable format, and offered to Eject, Ignore, or format.
I plugged it into my wife's work PC and it offered it format it right away.
I believe my course of action is to purchase a new drive, make a full new back up to it, then reformat the old drive, and begin alternating between them.
So i guess back to my first question, what the the largest USB HDD size that my NAS can recognize and use a s destination for backups?
I am thinking you formatted the USB drive on the NAS, likely using the EXT format that Mac and Windows doesn't recognize. I think there was a bug a while back that would account for the loss of space.
I don't see much point in using a drive format that you can only read on the NAS. Generally I think NTFS is the best option, so I'd reformat it on the PC. Then you'd be able to read/write to the drive from windows, and read from it on a Mac. You might need to delete the partitions ("volumes") using Windows Disk Manager first, and then create a new partition that fills the whole disk.
As far as the max size goes, a lot of the very large USB drives (5TB and up) use SMR technology. These might cause some issues with the NAS. There's no easy way to tell if a large USB drive uses SMR or not - the specs generally don't say. One approach is to get a powered USB enclosure + an internal drive - then you will know the drive specs.
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