Incremental backups onto 2 USB drives?

It should allocate a different name and mount point for the USB drive, so it will be able to tell the hardware apart.

What I do is have two backup jobs for each share, and do a full backup every 4 weeks. You can set in the job which USB HDD the files go to. I've then set up these jobs to be two weeks apart, so I have a rotation.

Thanks BFG. So you always do full backups? I'm assuming you are otherwise it wouldn't matter about timestamps, because every backup would include every file. It would be nice to be able to do incrementals if possible because the full backups take an absolute age! Incidentally, do you keep one of the USBs plugged in then and just take it off site when you swap them over?

Cheers,

James

You should be able to do incrementals with no problem. rsync will compare the contents of the USB backup with the share.

Though I do suggest doing full backups occasionally - that will flush out any failures on the USB drive. I have sometimes had read-errors when trying to restore old backups...

Thanks StephenB,

So, do I need to do anything special, or is it literally just a case of stick either of the drives in, hit the button, and hey presto it works?

I guess I can test this by doing two back-to-back front-panel backups onto the two drives, and checking the logs between each one? It should show me that both backups copied the same files?

You mention doing full backups from time to time. Would I reformat the drives occasionally to force a full backup?

I'm sorry for the basic questions, but as I become more and more reliant on the fabulous ReadyNAS, the more I realise that I should be careful with backups.

Finally, do you advocate leaving one drive plugged in at all times and having it do a backup automatically each night? Then I can just swap the USB drives over ever couple of days? That seems like an easy backup strategy that would be quite robust.

Many thanks again!

James