Advice on backup and replication

DynamicIS wrote:
Act as a Backup Store for the files from the server rather than nightly tape backups. if this can be done more frequently than nightly to give more of a continuous protection then thats even better (perhaps using a Netgear Software on the server rather than using Backup Exec)

You could use the built-in backup feature of the NAS. Check this article and the sub-articles linked into it: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detai ... -system%3F

About Continuous Data Protection, check these articles below:
http://www.netgear.com/images/ReadyNAS% ... -76104.pdf
http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detai ... erating-my

DynamicIS wrote:
Have a 2nd NAS offsite at the branch office that the backups are replicated to so we have offsite storage of all the live and historic data.

You could use ReadyNAS Replicate here. Kindly check this article and the sub-articles linked into it: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detai ... -6-storage

DynamicIS wrote:
Have an offsite "accessable" copy of the current live data (ie 4TB) at the branch office so that if there is a major outage on the connectivity between the 2 sites, the branch office can be easily configured to utilise their copy of the data. They would not have access to this data except in this specific instance.

Since you mentioned that you have a VPN connection, if ever that VPN connection goes down and you still have internet access, ReadyCloud would be useful. You could just give remote access to certain users to remotely access the shares via ReadyCloud.

Kindly check this article and the sub-articles linked into it:
http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detai ... -system%3F

I suggest to you to get an Intel-based ReadyNAS OS 6 model. Check it here: http://netgear.com/images/pdf/ReadyNAS_ ... 700_DS.pdf