Backing up whole ReadyNAS 516

Got the dates fixed.  It's backing up like it should.  Set the backup Dates/Time for 2 days a week on some things that are more active and 1 day a week for everything else, and then the Backup NAS, the QNAP will power on/off on it's own at the times needed on it's own.  Save on power and wear and tear on the QNAP.  I have no need to really run it more then that.   This is much better then before doing things manually.  Now I need to find a place to put this QNAP.  Off-Site would be the best.    I have a few other idea's.  I'll test it as it is for a couple weeks and make sure all it good.    Clearly backing up your NAS to another NAS is the best solution if you're in the Terabytes.    If you can backup all your Data onto 1 HDD, you could backup a few ways.  Either have it plugged into your computer, in which you can rsync that way if you wanted.  Or a external drive, or a bare drive plugged in a Dock plugged into the NAS.   

I have over 13TB of Data, not even 1 10 TB drive is going to get all that Data.  It's going to take at least 2 HDD.  I found that trying to manually backup was a huge hassle.  To the point of being lazy and not keeping up with it.  I tried a few different ways to backup. Plugged into the NAS, or Plugged into my Windows PC and using Windows Backup software and copying over the Network that way.   In the end, just to much of a hassle.   That makes this cheap, used NAS well worth it.  I can use 2 8TB drives in a RAID0, which is no redundancy.  It makes 1 big HDD.  Since it's a Backup, that's ok for my neds. That also leaves 2 bays free.  When I get larger HDD for the ReadyNAS 516 to increase it's storage, I can just pop in another 8TB HDD to my NAS and increase it's backup storage.  If I need more, pop in another 8TB drive.  These are are cheaper Seagate Archive drives.  They are not good for a normal NAS.  They're not fast.  They don't have the extra NAS drive features.  It's doing Archive/Backup on this QNAP NAS.  So I am really using it as it was designed.  This QNAP will only be powered on for 2 days a week for about 7 hours.  More then enough times to backup anything new on those days.  This allows much less wear and tear on everything.  IF something happens with the main NAS, like a infection, it's much less likely to transfer over to the QNAP as it's OFF 90% of the time.    I think this will work really well.

Now if your a Business,  you really want to duplicate what you have.  You have a ReadyNAS 516 with 6 3TB HDD's in it, you're going to want to have a second one with the same HDD's at least.   That way you're backing up, but if for whatever reason the main NAS takes a dump, you can switch over to the backup like nothing has happened, pretty quickly.   You don't want to take a huge speed hit from going the cheap route.  For myself as a home user, it's not critical, for a business it is.  Your Data is going to be more important where you may want to backup every hour.  Not just every 24 hours.

When you're thinking about buying one NAS, maybe think about buying 2!!! Using just 1 NAS is not a backup!!! Doesn't matter if you;re using RAID5 or RAID6 or whatever else. That just allows your NAS to continue running if 1 HDD, maybe 2 in RAID6 fails on you and you can swap it out in time. Sometimes that extra wear and tear of having to rebuild the NAS onto the new HDD is enough to cause another to fail in the middle of the process and now you've lost lost your data!!! That's just 1 of many things that can go wrong. Fire, Burglary, NAS breaks down, etc.

I'm by no means a expert, but I've figured it out. I'm my own tech support most of the time.