Built In Backup not Working RN312

TobyE wrote:
So I figure, this can't be right.

Excellent. Sometimes it's hard to resist the temptation to just post "This effing junkbox is a piece of crap!", which... Well, the night is young; you might still get to that point. But at least that's not where you're starting.

My ReadyNAS boxes are all running OS4, so I can't help you with any OS6-specific questions. While you wait for someone who can, though, maybe I have a couple of ideas you might find helpful.

TobyE wrote:
1. Are my assumptions about the built in backup facility correct? Is there no client backup?

OS4 has a client backup (i.e., a way to pull files from the Windows PCs on your network), so I would expect it to be available on OS6, too. However, that "pull" backup might not be what you want:

• It's not nearly as configurable as a "push" backup. Most Windows backup programs have an extensive default list of directory and file exclusions, and can accomodate wildcards and/or regular expressions for your own exclusions/inclusions; the OS6 backup probably doesn't. Also, it's easy to configure a PC backup program to backup various directories on different schedules -- you could do that with multiple backup jobs on the ReadyNAS, but I can't imagine that it would be any fun.


• Backup software running on your PCs can use the Volume Shadow Service to backup files that are open or locked (like email inbox files, which might be nearly always open and therefore uncopyable by a remote process running on the ReadyNAS)


• The NAS will try to backup on a schedule; if the PCs it's pulling from are not present when it tries to pull from them, it won't try again until the next scheduled time. Backup software on the PCs, though, can push backups as soon as possible after a schedule miss.


• For the NAS to pull from your PCs, you'll have to give it a semi-privileged (read access to everything) username and password for each of them. On OS4 the passwords are stored in plaintext, which might or might not bother you.

For these and other reasons, I prefer to push backups from my PCs to the NAS. I happen to use SyncBackSE.

TobyE wrote:
2. Is there no viable Server (ReadyNAS) backup?

OS4 allows a destination path to be chosen for each backup, so you could backup one ReadyNAS share to, say, USB1/ShareA and another ReadyNAS share to USB1/ShareB. I would be astonished to hear that OS6 doesn't have that facility and instead forces all backups to go directly to USB1/.

TobyE wrote:
3. Is it unreasonable to expect the server to handle 2 clients trying to backup at the same time?

No.

TobyE wrote:
4. Is there another backup solution that would work in this situation?

Well, I've already given the basics of the solution I use: Every PC runs SyncBackSE, which is configured to perform a one-way sync every hour to a ReadyNAS share that's mapped to a Windows drive letter (i.e., new and changed files are copied to the NAS, deleted files are deleted from the NAS).

The rest of the solution is: Rsnapshot runs on the NAS. Every four hours it snapshots the PC-backup share (along with other shares and most of the NAS's own root partition) to an external USB drive. Those four-hour snapshots are kept for a day, daily snapshots are kept for a week, weekly snapshots are kept for a month, and monthly snapshots are kept for three months; most of the data doesn't change often, so the USB storage requirement is only about 1.5x the size of the shares. Someday soon I'm going to replace or augment the external USB drive with another ReadyNAS geographically far away.

That particular solution works for me, but might not be right for you. I hear that OS6 has built-in snapshots, for example, so I don't think you'd want or need the rsnapshot-to-a-local-USB-drive thing. But in any case, your current problems are more low-level than that: You need to get basic file-copying to work. With luck, someone who really knows OS6 will post an easy answer to that problem.