I have to back up,my photos as they are only on a 5 year old laptop drive .
theres about 200 gb although I need to run a duplicate scanner.
I am am a bit of layman so words of one syllable please . My thinking is to use Ethernet to the router and just click and paste the whole file to the NAS just like a spare drive.
is this the way or can I set up a backup to the NAS and let it do its thing.
I am am a bit of layman so words of one syllable please . My thinking is to use Ethernet to the router and just click and paste the whole file to the NAS just like a spare drive.
That works, and is probably the simplest way.
If the laptop runs Windows, then enter \\nas-ip-address into windows file explorer (using the real IP address of the NAS), and it should show you the shares that are available. You can get the IP address from RAIDar ( https://kb.netgear.com/20684/ReadyNAS-Downloads#raidar ) or from your router. It usually is a number like 192.168.1.x (where x varies), but it could be a different number. You can also try using the NAS hostname (which you might have set when you set up the NAS). Be careful to use the correct slash direction (\\).
If the laptop runs OSX (e.g is a mac), then you would access the NAS using finder.
Then click on one of the folder names (called shares), and navigate into it. You likely will get a user/password prompt - you should enter a user account that is created on the NAS. The NAS admin account will work. You should then be able to drag/drop your photo folders - just like copying them on a local machine.
If you want to regularly update your photos backup (or other files on the PC), you might consider using something like freefilesync on the PC. There are other tools you can use to back up the entire PC hard drive to the NAS. I use Acronis TrueImage for this (which is not free) - but there are several other choices out there.
It is possible to use the built-in NAS backup jobs to do this task too, but in my opinion those tools are best suited for backing up the NAS itself (for instance to a USB hard drive). I do recommend backing up the NAS that way, personally I keep at least 3 copies of anything I care about (on three different devices). Computer equipment (including the NAS) does fail sometimes, and I learned the hard way (many years ago) that having one backup isn't safe enough. It's very frustrating to discover your backup has failed when you need to restore your data.
i am considering my back up options at the minute and acronis looks interesting. a permanant automatic or one button press back up would be ideal. otherwise i will be in this situatuation again in a few months.
my back up is in a mess to be honest. i currently have dropbox 1tb, picasso , icloud , etc.
Your redundency situation of 3 copies sounds good , do you think laptop plus nas which is raid 2bay so two copies and a cloud upload is sufficient ?
one thing i would ask is i have two office pc's in my office which is a few hundred miles away.
could acronis back these upto my NAS over the broadband or does it only work on lan.
Your redundency situation of 3 copies sounds good , do you think laptop plus nas which is raid 2bay so two copies and a cloud upload is sufficient ?
Yes, I'd count that as three copies. I don't count RAID redundancy, but I do count the original (laptop+NAS+cloud = 3 copies). I count the NAS as one copy because the NAS itself can fail in ways that compromise the RAID array.
I'm not using the Acronis Cloud, I use Crashplan for disaster recovery. Acronis Cloud Backup pricing does look competitive if all your data is on one PC.
Clarko wrote:
i am considering my back up options at the minute and acronis looks interesting. a permanant automatic or one button press back up would be ideal. otherwise i will be in this situatuation again in a few months.
I do image backups (which allow me to completely restore the PC), with a NAS share as the target. These can be scheduled (and I do that on our desktops), but I just run them manually every week on the laptops. The image backups are incremental, but configured to do a full backup every couple of months.
I'm sure there are other good backup solutions out there, but I've used Acronis for several years now, and it has worked out well for me.
John, you should consider whether you want ‘an image’ backed up or the files independently backed up so that they are accessible easily (without restore).
You didn’t mention which OS you are using?
i have used various backup utilities and find FreeFileSync useful too as Stephen mentioned. It’s a manual solution, as you have to control it each time, but that works for me just fine.
Windows and macOS both have integrated backup which are worth a look.
From you NAS, I recommend using an external drive connected via USB and run a NAS backup job. It works well this way and you have suitable copies of everything, and this covers all users of the NAS if you have any others.
John, you should consider whether you want ‘an image’ backed up or the files independently backed up so that they are accessible easily (without restore).
I use image backup on the PCs because I want the ability to easily restore the entire PC (Window, programs, and ordinary files).
But in general I use the NAS for primary storage. So we've put the photos on the NAS (along with our documents and media files). Then of course I back up the NAS. Centralizing them makes it easier to find them, manage the storage, etc.
That’s my exact use case too - I think time machine on Mac is ideal and maybe backup on Windows is wort a shot (but in the event of a PC disaster, I prefer to reinstall from scratch anyway).
