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Re: FrontView ReadyNAS To ReadyNAS Backups

nhelder
Aspirant

FrontView ReadyNAS To ReadyNAS Backups

Hello,

I have a ReadyNAS Pro 6 (RNDP6000-200NAS) and am considering purchasing a ReadyNAS Ultra 2 (RNDU2000-100NAS) for use as a backup device.

My goals for this new device are:
1) Give me enough capacity to back up the Pro (~5tb)
2) Have my backup have some health smarts built in (SMART checks, file system validation, etc.)

In order to achieve #1 the plan would be to throw two 3tb drives in the Ultra 2 as a stripe. Yes, this would present risk of data loss in the case of a single drive failure, but I'm ok with that as long as #2 is in place to tell me as soon as that failure begins happening.

The Ultra 2 would be used for off-site backup storage and would generally only be used in a disaster recovery type of scenario. I don't have plans to make use of Replicate - instead I'd be manually moving the Ultra 2 between home and off-site to perform manual backups. These manual backups would take place once every 1-2 months.


Ok, now that all the background is out of the way, here are my (probably quite simple) questions:

1a) Is there any compatibility issues or things I should be aware of when doing a FrontView sync between the two ReadyNAS devices?
1b) The Pro 6 has 8tb of capacity, but only 5 is used... so I assume the backup process would still work fine backing up the 5tb of data to the 6tb of space on the Ultra 2?
2) There is a portion of space on the Pro 6 being used for Time Machine backups - are there any issues backing those up to a secondary ReadyNAS device?
3) Another option that could be used would to back up by LUN... is there any support for "snapshotting" a LUN from one ReadyNAS device directly to another?
4) Are there any other concerns or perhaps all-together different approaches I might want to consider for this particular situation?

Thanks in advance for any feedback you have on the above,

- Nathan
Message 1 of 5
StephenB
Guru

Re: FrontView ReadyNAS To ReadyNAS Backups

nhelder wrote:
1a) Is there any compatibility issues or things I should be aware of when doing a FrontView sync between the two ReadyNAS devices?
frontview backup will abort on a dropped connection, other than that I am not thinking of anything.
nhelder wrote:
1b) The Pro 6 has 8tb of capacity, but only 5 is used... so I assume the backup process would still work fine backing up the 5tb of data to the 6tb of space on the Ultra 2?
Yes, the backup should still work fine, with the obvious impact of losing the full volume if a disk fails.
nhelder wrote:
3) Another option that could be used would to back up by LUN... is there any support for "snapshotting" a LUN from one ReadyNAS device directly to another?
Is the pro-6 running xraid-2? You can backup volumes or folders separately.
nhelder wrote:
4) Are there any other concerns or perhaps all-together different approaches I might want to consider for this particular situation?

Probably you want to use rsync for this. the pro-2 has built in support for rsync over ssh, the ultra doesn't (though there is a community add-ons for that). You probably want to do the original backup with the units on the same LAN (using NFS) to get it done faster.

You could also use CrashPlan, storing one Crashplan backup in the cloud and a second on the backup NAS. That would probably deal with dropped connections better, and also give you deduplication and compression. Note you can use CrashPlan to archive to the second NAS using their free plan, though the unlimited crashplan+ is pretty inexpensive, and gets you a second disaster recovery option if you need it.
Message 2 of 5
nhelder
Aspirant

Re: FrontView ReadyNAS To ReadyNAS Backups

Thanks for the reply.

The one wrinkle in my situation is that my offsite storage location (work) wouldn't take too kindly to putting the Ultra 2 on the network - so that's why I'm more thinking of only doing manual, intermittent, on-site backups. So, dropped connections shouldn't be an issue in this case, as the backups will be happening locally.

Yes, the Pro 6 is running xraid-2 (in triple redundancy mode). So I'm not all that concerned about "losing" data on the primary device... the offsite is more just in case the house burns down or if I delete something and later decide I'd like to have back.

I hadn't heard of CrashPlan... unlimited space for $50 a year is actually quite reasonable. It wouldn't catch the Time Machine backups (which I'm under the impression a FrontView backup between ReadyNAS device would catch...?) but that may or may not be a significant concern.
Message 3 of 5
StephenB
Guru

Re: FrontView ReadyNAS To ReadyNAS Backups

You must mean dual-redundancy on the Pro, it doesn't support triple.

If you are thinking about storing the ultra 2 in your office, and simply moving it home periodically to do a backup, then FrontView backup should work well. To get the fastest backup times, you'd do the initial backup with NFS, and then edit the backup job(s) to do rsync when that completes (giving you incremental backups). You'd probably also want to do occasional disk scrubs on the ultra 2.

Also, you'd want to be careful when transporting. I've seen some reports here that the disks occasionally need to be reseated after transport.
Message 4 of 5
nhelder
Aspirant

Re: FrontView ReadyNAS To ReadyNAS Backups

Sorry, yes - dual redundancy (+ the original data, so I guess that's what made me think '3').

Thanks again for the replies - most helpful.
Message 5 of 5
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