Faster restore option: USB 2.0 or Gigabit E?

I'd go with a backup over ethernet.

What filesystem is on your backup drive? If it's not a native Linux filesystem (e.g. EXT3) performance could well be quite slow if you restore from a USB disk directly connected to the ReadyNAS.

Directly connecting the USB disk to the NAS would have the advantage that you could run a Frontview backup job to restore the data and not have to worry about leaving a desktop computer on to copy the files back.

Thanks for the response.

Disc will be formatted NTFS. Yeah, I forgot I could run a FrontView session via USB! Never used it for "restore", I'm assuming I'll figure it out once I can bring FrontView up, again. Yes, leaving the desktop on for 2-3 days is not that appealing to me. It sucks power, and we occasionally have power dropouts here. The NAS is on a UPS, but I my UPS isn't big enough to keep the desktop from going down when I lose power.

NTFS would probably be pretty slow. I'd seriously consider transferring the data across your network.

If you connect the USB disk to the NAS, you can do a Frontview backup job. You select the USB disk as the source and the share on the NAS as the destination. It's very straightforward.

If you want to backup a path on the USB drive you can type it in the path field e.g. "foldername1/foldername2" (no quotes)

How much faster do you think it would be over Ethernet? I think USB would be 2-3 days, maybe 10MB/s? It's all music files.

I'm not sure how much quicker it'd be, but NTFS is pretty slow with Sparc ReadyNAS devices. Remember USB backups are CPU intensive and Sparc ReadyNAS have slow CPUs.

Either way it is going to take a while.

Good to know....

Last question: since I was only using one HDD (and don't have a useful FrontView config file saved anywhere) aren't I forced to do a full factory reset to even get the NV back up? I'm bummed my config seems to be lost, but I suppose I can muddle through to get all my prevoius settings. If I could bring my old config back up, it sure would make my life easier.

I tried asking this question via a support ticket, but it has been a week and they haven't responded.

The config is stored on the disks. Unless you downloaded the config sometime before the NAS failed you will have to manually reconfigure the NAS from scratch.

I'd suggest putting a disk in the NAS, updating to the latest firmware (if not already running it), then do another factory reset to get a clean setup on the latest firmware. A factory reset after updating to 4.1.7+ will give you 4k sector alignment which is important with most 2TB disks.

I'd suggest having a couple of disks installed in your ReadyNAS. Disks can and do fail at any time and having a couple of disks installed running X-RAID or Flex-RAID RAID-1, reduces the likelihood of needing to do a full restore from backup.

Thanks for confirming that the config is on the crashed disc. Bad news, but at least I have a plan to move forward with.

I was running 4.1.7, and had the 4k sectors for my last 2TB disc. I will probably go ahead and try 4.1.8 beta, as I think I'll get a Lion machine soon, and would like to back up with Time Machine.

Yeah, I'm no longer running RAID because I keep several backups, and it just seemed wasteful for my at-home situation. Being down a week won't kill me, it's just more inconvenient than anything.

Well considering you can pickup a 2TB drive fairly cheaply these days I'd disagree, but each to his own. Doing regular backups would be important either way.

Giving 4.1.8 beta a try would be well worth it. It adds features, some of which are recommended by Apple for Time Machine backups when using Snow Leopard, but only required from Lion onwards.

Thanks again for the tips. If I lose another HDD in the NV, I'll just say fck it and upgrade to an Ultra 2 and throw two discs in there for RAID-1.

Hopefully I'll be back up and running later this week!