acronis and readynas. will it work for my backups?

---

luckyinpa wrote:

i'm going to ditch mycloud for possibly the 422. the number one thing i want to do with NAS is use my acronis to regularly make an image of my C drive then do incremental backups of the data drive.

 

has anyone restored using acronis from the NAS to a laptop. I'm assuming after using the boot software acronis gives you that it will pick up the NAS and you just restore from the drives but i wanted to make sure there's no caveats with using a NAS for the backup on my win 8 machine. 

 

---

This is my own approach to PC backup, which I've used for many years - I am using it with 4 PCs now.   The schedule is to make a full image backup about every 2 months, with incremental backups in between.

The two desktops use the Acronis scheduling feature (wake themselves up weekly, and back up to my RN526x).  I do the two laptops manually.  The Acronis destination is set to a NAS backup share.

This works well for me, though I do suggest reserving the IP address of the NAS in the router, and using the IP address in Acronis instead of the NAS hostname.  Also, although Acronis is set to delete the older backup series when it makes a full image backup, that deletion doesn't always happen.  So I do keep check the backup share occasionally (every few weeks) and delete the old ones.

My practice is to make these backups over ethernet, though if you have a fast and reliable 802.11ac network you could use wifi.

---

luckyinpa wrote:

 

has anyone restored using acronis from the NAS to a laptop.

It's been a while since I had to do this, but I have done a bare-metal restore a couple of times.  I don't recall the exact steps, but it wasn't difficult (similar to what you outline).  The acronis restore boot image let me navigate to the NAS share and select the backup.  The last time I did it, laptops still had built-in DVD drives.  Now of course you'd need make sure you can actually boot the restore image (with a suitable USB device).  

---

luckyinpa wrote:

 

i'm going with a pair of 2 or 3 tb WD likely Red drives based on what i've read is best for NAS

 

---

I recommend NAS-purposed or enterprise-class drives for all ReadyNAS.  I use WD Reds myself, and have found them to be reliable.  Seagate Ironwolf is another option.  Personally I also use the NAS for storage consolidation.  If you plan to do that, then perhaps go with a larger capacity drive.  Also, if the NAS is used for primary storage, then you do need to back it up (as any device can fail, as can RAID arrays).  If it's purely used for backup, the you might not need to do that.

You might also consider UPS protection for the NAS, as unexpected power loss is a common cause of data loss.

---

luckyinpa wrote:

 

also when you use raid 1 does the NAS just show up as one drive through windows?

---

Yes and no.  

A RAID-1 array is a virtual disk created from the two physical disks.  The NAS then creates a single file system (volume) on that virtual disk - with a default name of /data.  The drives are mirrored, so everything written to the volume is written onto both disks.  Once that is set up, you create one of more network shares on that volume (several are created by default- which you can use or delete).

When you access the NAS from windows, you'll see the full list of network shares.  If you use the NAS admin credentials, then "data" will be in the list, and you can access the entire volume by clicking on it.  If you use other credentials, you see the shares on the volume, but not the root of the volume (data).

You can also map any share (or the full data volume) to a Windows drive letter.  You don't have to do that to use Acronis, as you can set it's destination to a network share.