Much Ado About ReadyNAS Ultra 4

Ok. I'm trying it right now....

YES!!!! It's doing the backup job now! Awesome! I can still access the volumes during the backup! YES!!! Thank you! Thank you!!

Adiemus - when you are finished with the NFS backup (which will probably take hours and hours, change the server to Rsync Server and manually run it again. This just verifies the backup.

To now make the NV+ the backup and the Ultra 4 the primary, just reverse the jobs. You can either edit the jobs on the NV+ (by clicking on the job number) and pull the jobs, or set up new ones on the Ultra 4 to push the job. I would recommend the latter as you can set the jobs up on the Ultra before you delete them from the NV+, or you can leave them on the NV+, just make sure the box in front of the job name (the enable box) is unchecked. The check enables the scheduled backup and a job does not have to be enabled to be run manually by clicking on the "GO" button.

If you run your backups over night as I do, if you really mess up a file, yesterday's version will still be on the backup unit.

Great! Thanks PapaBear!! :))))

Keep you posted.... Many hours later... ;P

Anyone got an indication of how long 2.1Tb of data transfers would take??

My estimate is about 25 hours. Thats the bad news. The good news is that with rsync, the future backups (remember that while we call them backups, they are really synchronizations of the two units) will only take minutes, not hours. And of course you don't have to search incremental backups for a more recent copy of a file.

My estimate is based on 2.1TB being about 2.2 million megabytes and the backup will run about 25 megabytes/second or a little over 88,000 seconds = 24+ hours.

Thanks PapaBear.

I just checked. After running the backup job for almost 8 hours, it's only transferred 300Gb of data. I reckon this is gonna take more than 2 days...

Jumbo frames are enabled on both NASes. They're hooked up to a 3COM Gigabit switch.

Just wondering...

Are we able to stop a backup job?
And if we do, are we able to resume from where we stopped? Assuming that this is the first backup job and we're midway through the jib.

Best not to stop the job but that'd probably work fine.

Another crazy thought.

Can I skip the switch and connect my 2 NASes using a Cat 5 crossover cable? In my case, the NV+ ethernet port and the Ultra4 Ethernet1 port. Then hook up my PC to Ethernet2 port on the Ultra 4 to initiate the backup job? Won't the transfers be faster, than having to go through a switch?