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Forum Discussion
My recommendation: Don't use ReadyCloud user home shares
The recent issue with the ReadyCloud server has shown a vulnerablility of losing everything in a ReadyCloud users' home share. While I expect Netgear to take steps to prevent that in the future, I c...
jak0lantash wrote:- Some of my devices transfer their backups to one NAS, some to the other one, to reduce impact of a failure of a NAS before further propagation of backups.
I forgot to mention something important about that:
A backup should be read-only. For example, if the machine is compromised, you don't want its backup to be exposed and vulnerable.
All the devices push their backups to their assigned NAS. As they push it, they need read-write access. So to avoid fully exposing the backups, for each client device, only the share on its assigned NAS is read-write, the share on its secondary NAS is read-only.
jak0lantash wrote:
- Daily, the first NAS mirrors the data from its devices to the second NAS, then the second NAS mirrors the data from its devices to the first one, to lower the risk of impact of a complete NAS failure.
This is actually not accurate. Only one NAS controls the mirroring. So the first NAS pushes the backups of its devices to the second NAS and pulls the backups of the other one's devices to itself.
This approach contradicts the previous point that a backup should be read-only. As the first NAS pushes some backups to the second one, it has to access the remote share in read-write. To alleviate the risk implications, the backup tasks between NASes use a dedicated VLAN, and the "exposed" shares are only accessible read-write on the "backup" VLAN, while being read-only on the "data" VLAN.
Also the "first" NAS described here is powered off most of the day, only boots up to perform the mirroring tasks and shut down once complete.
jak0lantash wrote:
A backup should be read-only. For example, if the machine is compromised, you don't want its backup to be exposed and vulnerable.
My own are read/write (though i probably should change that). My disaster recovery (Crashplan) is not exposed, so I could recover everything even if all the local backups were lost.
There is a trade-off here. If you do pull backups (from the secondary NAS) it is easy to make the secondary shares read-only. But push backups on OS 6 are made from snapshots, so they are always coherent. Push requires read/write. If you use rsync, you can still make SMB, etc read-only (or completely disabled).
I've sketched out my backup plan in other places. Currently it looks like this:
-The main NAS is the 526x. It is a combination of primary storage and secondary storage. My PCs (4 at present) all do Acronis Image backup to 526x weekly. For the two desktops, this is scheduled. The two laptops are done manually.
-A 524x is secondary. Daily backups of each share are made with RN526 as source. Snapshots are enabled, with 3 month retention for most share. The Acronis image share has 2 week retention, to better manage space.
-A pro-6 serves as tertiary. This runs OS 4.2.30, so it is ext instead of BTRFS. Daily backups of each share are made with the RN526 as source. Crashplan runs on this NAS.
I could daisy chain the backups instead of taking them from the primary NAS, but I believe the RN524x snapshots give me enough rollback.
Sandshark wrote:
My advice is to stop using user home shares for ReadyCloud users.
I agree - and if you don't have a lot of users, you are better off not using home shares at all. Creating a share for each user is more flexible and easier to troubleshoot.
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