Advice on backup and replication

StephenB wrote:
Personally I haven't seen enough reliability and consistent performance out of ReadyCloud to recommend it for corporate use. If the two sites are seamlessly connected by the routers using VPN tunnels or perhaps MPLS, then backups can run over the existing corporate network. If they aren't connected that way, the I'd suggest creating a corporate network as part of this project.

We utilise Untangle at either end and this creates an IPSEC VPN tunnel between the 2 sites. I dont want to run backups (and certainly nothing continuous) over the VPN link directly. I would rather have a local (to Disk) backup first then replicate that over the WAN/VPN.

If ReadyCloud isnt suitable then I wont be using it. Can it be installed on a server to monitor the data put into a shared folder (or an entire drive..?) and synchronise the data to the ReadyNAS?

StephenB wrote:

The continuous protection offered by snapshots are useful locally on each NAS, but you can't back up the snapshots to a remote system efficiently. The built-in NAS backup jobs do simple file copies - they aren't capable of 2-way sync, and there isn't any versioning. I'm not a replicate user, so I don't have any feedback on that to offer. Egynte is a Netgear partner, and you might want to look at their ReadyNAS offerings.

The problem with using an external partner is one of cost. 4TB of basic data plus versioning over 6 months is a lot of data and costs to add. Id rather invest in the hardware at either site and leverage the leased lines we have if possible.

StephenB wrote:
The net here is that (a) CoW Snapshots are useful, but you need to understand their limitations (b) you'll need to make a deeper dive on the Netgear backup facilities to make sure they meet your requirements.

Thats the plan. Thanks for the input. I think the most useful feature Im seeing is the Replicate functionality as the others wont fit with our data needs. Having said that, Backup Exec does allow us to have backups and use the ReadyNAS as a storage device but its that extra element of wanting the files in an accessable format offsite that makes that approach fall over.

Paul..