Back up ready NAS to a portable HD for off site backkup

dcvh007 wrote:
We have a ready NAS with 2 drives installed. I was wondering what is the best way to backup the contents. I am worried about disk failure, but also want to cover ourselves if the office were to burn down / blow up / disappear etc! Can I attached a 1TB portable / external drive to the NAS, do a backup, then remove and take it out of the building? Thanks D

Yes, that will work.

There are also cloud backup services that can be used for disaster recovery (crashplan, readynas vault, etc). They have the benefit of running automatically.

A third option is to deploy another readynas in a different location and connect the two locations with a VPN tunnel. Then you can use Frontview backup to do nightly backups to the remote NAS over the internet.

These last two options require good internet speeds. Also CrashPlan won't run on a duo, it needs an x86 platform (ultra or pro).

the online backups aren't an option as the internet connection in the building is not great at all...

So if using a portable, could I use this type thing?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/LaCie-Rugged-Triple-FW800-FW400/dp/B003Q7ZGP8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1330088518&sr=8-2

Is it as simple as plugging it into the front? How do you start a backup? I am on OSX. Do I simply copy the files via Finder?

Thanks

D

dcvh007 wrote:
the online backups aren't an option as the internet connection in the building is not great at all... So if using a portable, could I use this type thing? http://www.amazon.co.uk/LaCie-Rugged-Tr ... 518&sr=8-2 Is it as simple as plugging it into the front? How do you start a backup? I am on OSX. Do I simply copy the files via Finder? Thanks D

Normally you set up a backup job with Frontview. You can run it manually from FrontView web interface, configure the backup button on the NAS to launch it, or set up a backup schedule (though that would only work if the disk were plugged in). The documentation covers this (around page 81 here: http://www.readynas.com/download/docume ... 6Dec11.pdf). You'll get fastest performance if the USB drive is formatted as ext3.

There is also a guide here on using rsync for incremental backups: http://www.rnasguide.com/2010/09/23/rsy ... -usb-disk/ rsync is good for updating a backup that is already on the drive, but is rather slow for creating the initial backup.

Not sure if the LaCie will work or not - maybe other users can tell you for certain.

If you are on OSX then have a look at CarbonCopyCloner (http://www.bombich.com/). It's free but worth a donation. Lots of people on Mac Rumours use it. See : http://forums.macrumors.com/
You will need to format the drive in the right format (ext4 I think, but CCC will help you). I use CCC as a more intelligent addition to TIme Mchine