Request for review of basic backup plan RN10200 OS 6.6.1 (Newbie)

Backups are important, and I think it's great when folks ask for review of their backup plans.

One thing to consider: USB drives can fail.  And if you do incremental backups (which run the fastest), you can run into problems if sectors go bad on files that aren't changing. I've sometimes run into this - getting read errors when I finally do need to get the files back.

There are two adjustments to your strategy that can reduct this risk (and you can do both).

-You can rotate two USB drives in your backup plan.  That gives you two independent backups (one a bit older than the other).

-You can also periodically wipe do a full backup to the USB drive.  The web ui backup has an option for this, you can also just delete all the files from time to time.

A variation on the second suggestion is regularly test the drive (for instance with disk utility on the mac).

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BadBob wrote:

 1. Is this backup scheme what I need to reach my goal? If not, detailed suggestions.

 

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If you are backing up to the NAS with TimeMachine, those are backed up to hidden folders that might not be copied.

Otherwise, you are backing up the full data volme, which should reach your goal.

You should disallow snapshot access on the NAS shares (not the snapshots themselves, just the access).  You can't back up the snapshots efficiently, and if snapshot access is allowed I believe the backup job will attempt to back them up.

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BadBob wrote:

 

2. Can I disconnect the USB drive until I want to another manual backup? If so, is there a menu in ReadyCloud or Admin to safely eject the drive or can I just pull the USB connection? Location of eject, if there is one?(I can't find one.)

 

 

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You do need to eject the drive before you remove it.  There are two methods

1. You can set up the backup job to eject when done
2. You can manually eject (system->volumes, then click on the settings wheel next to the USB volume)

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BadBob wrote:

 

3. I am concerned that if I leave the drive connected to the NAS that ReadyCloud can “accidentally” delete my access to this backup as in the March 30th incident. Finally, I am concerned with leaving this drive on 24/7. Quality of the drive is not as good as my NAS HHD’s.

 

Another option you have is to connect the USB disk to the Mac, use the built-in OSX file sharing service to share the USB drive.  You can then adjust the backup job on the NAS so it will copy the files over the network to the MAC. 

Or, you can use a Mac utility to copy the full data volume from the NAS to the USB drive instead of using the NAS backup jobs.  For instance, FreeFileSync.

Either way you are isolating your backup from the ReadyNAS itself.  Plus you can use native OSX formatting for the USB drive.

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BadBob wrote:

4. Finally, assume the NAS loses access via ReadyCloud, will the data on the backup be visible and usable if I plug the drive into my iMac or even a Windows machine which I can get access to?

 

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That depends on how the USB drive is formatted - and unfortunately the NAS doesn't support the native OSX filesystems.  One option is to get the paragon NTFS software for OSX, and format the USB drive to use ntfs.  Then you can read (and write) to the USB drive from both OSX and Windows systems.

It is important to verify that you can read the backup, so this is an important step.