Hi, I'm looking for a NAS to store my backups on but I really want encryption and I want to make use of snapshots or an incremental backup so I can just clone files from my windows PC then let the NAS handle the backup from there.
Does the readynas 102 support snapshots on encrypted volumes?
Is it able to encrypt data on an external USB/esata drive?
How does the backup tool work? Is it incremental?
Will the 102 be able to handle bitrot protection+encryption+snapshots or will it give me 11MBps as this user experienced? http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=424584#p424584 Or has performance improved since then?
What happens if the NAS unit dies, can the encrypted drive be accessed using a regular PC?
First, I think if you want to use this combination of features that you will be better off with a RN300 series. I'm not sure of the performance you'll see (since I don't use encryption). But encryption will slow things down. I've seen some posts that say the performance hit is 50%: https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopi ... 21&t=75345 The full volume is encrypted, and I believe that snapshots and all other BTRFS features are supported. All disks need to be the same size if you use encryption. Also, you need to keep a USB thumb drive in the NAS to hold the encryption key for the drive.
I don't believe you can encrypt the USB/esata drive, since encryption is set up when the internal disk volume is created.
The built-in backup tools copy files, supporting linux copy (cp), rsync, ftp, cifs (windows), or NFS. Incremental backup is supported - in the case of windows, changed files can be detected by either the archive bit or timestamp.
Personally I use the backup tool to back up the NAS itself (to another NAS). I use Acronis TrueImage to backup the PCs to the NAS. Acronis supports encrypted backups and incremental backups without needing encryption in the NAS itself - and since the encryption is done in the PC there is no performance hit in the NAS. So that might be worth looking at.
I discovered the readynas virtualbox image and have been playing with it:
Snapshots work on encrypted volumes. You can't encrypted USB drives and the ecryptFS kernel module is missing so you can't use that manually yourself. I guess I could encrypt a USB drive using cryptsetup but that would require decrypt->encrypt when copying files to USB.
It uses cryptsetup/LUKS for volume encryption so fairly standard.
I like how this is debian based, so no messing around with ipkg/optware. I assume most packages that work on x86 also work on arm with apt-get?
I wanted to try and keep the encryption on the NAS but it seems the ARM based ones will all be a little on the slow side so I'll look into true image.
For the most part if there is also an ARM version of something it should work equally well on an ARM system as the x86_64 version would work on a x86_64 system.
However it's possible this may not always be the case.
Also you need to be careful when installing things e.g. via apt-get to not fill the 4GB OS partition.
