I have a Duo v2 which is quickly running out of space (2x2TB drives). I know I can upgrade to 3TB drives, but I was looking at getting an NV+ v2, so it gives me a lot more room for expansion. The drives I've got are apparently compatible in the NV+, but can I simply take one drive out of the Duo and install it in the NV+ and keep my data? Or will it just format the drive? Is the best way to put a new drive in the NV and copy the data over?
That's one thing I don't do is back my data up. Noob question - Say I've got 2TB's worth of files (typically 4-10GB each) how much space does the backup file use?
If these are mostly media files it would take very close to 2 TBs. If a file already contains compressed data (which is the case with video) then compressing the archive doesn't help very much.
Most of us are copying the files though, not storing the backup as single archive file. You can do this fairly easily with a USB drive. If you have a desktop PC, you could also install an internal drive there that has the capacity.
Though backup costs some extra money for storage (and takes some effort to set up), RAID arrays do fail in ways that lose data. So you should back the NAS up.
If a lot of your data volume is in videos (they really eat the space) and they are not that critical (not family movies for example), then you only concentrate on the critical/important data. For example, while I have a 2.5TB data volume, only about 70GB of mine falls into that category. Personal financial records and photos that are not replicated elsewhere (except in my backups). In addition the NAS to NAS backup of all my shares, only the shares with critical/important data is then also backed up onto a WD passport and stored offsite. I do this periodically, but usually at least once a month. This is my fallback if a disaster befalls the house and wipes out my NAS units as well. (Fire, theft, natural disaster).
If a lot of your data volume is in videos (they really eat the space) and they are not that critical (not family movies for example), then you only concentrate on the critical/important data. For example, while I have a 2.5TB data volume, only about 70GB of mine falls into that category. Personal financial records and photos that are not replicated elsewhere (except in my backups). In addition the NAS to NAS backup of all my shares, only the shares with critical/important data is then also backed up onto a WD passport and stored offsite. I do this periodically, but usually at least once a month. This is my fallback if a disaster befalls the house and wipes out my NAS units as well. (Fire, theft, natural disaster).
There's room for more than one approach; the important thing is to consider the impact of losing all your data, and being intentional about what you back up (and what you choose not to back up).
Though almost all of my video and audio collection is not really "critical", it still would not be practical to replace it all if it were lost - especially if a disaster damaged the house. Plus I figure that there are some truly critical files that have been parked in the "wrong" folders.
So my backup plan covers my PCs and the entire NAS. That's about 6 TiB at the moment. My disaster recovery relies on the cloud (Crashplan backup), I also maintain local backups.
Disk images of my desktop C drives are backed up to the Pro every week (automatically). The laptops are also done weekly, but manually. Backups from my Pro (which is the main repository) to my older NV+ and Duo are daily and automatic, and Crashplan is continuous/automatic. I also manually run robocopy scripts periodically to copy the Pro repository to auxiliary hard drives in the desktops. The net is that I have two local backups of everything, plus the copy in the Crashplan cloud. If Crashplan continues to work out, I might drop to one local backup copy in the future.
