RN104 Stuck on booting 99% mysql.service

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Kiptanoi_New wrote:

 

1) Snapshots, do I need that on my data on the NAS?

And what is that? What use do I have of it?

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They are similar to the Windows recycle bin.  If you accidentally delete a file or folder (or make a bit editing mistake), you can recover an older copy from the snapshot.  You can do that by right-clicking on the file/folder in Windows and clicking on "restore previous versions".

If you want to use them, then I don't recommend using the "smart" snapshots.  The problem with those is that Netgear never deletes the monthly ones, and over time that can fill up the data volume.  I use custom snapshots myself with 3 months retention on most shares.  You can tune the retention to balance the amount of snapshot data.

Note that if you download torrents, you shouldn't enable snapshots on that share.  Similarly if the share has a live database.  The reason is fairly technical - the net is that the main share will end up heavily fragmented, and you will also end up with a lot of snapshot data.

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Kiptanoi_New wrote:

 

2)

Other settings....

If I am looking at Volumes and settings on my "data"

in the section volume schedule and action:

- Scrub, what does that? How often should I have that set to?

- Defrag, that one should be enough with once a year, right?

- Balance? What is that? Do I need that? How often?

- Disk test? Once a week? is that to often? Once a month? Or what do you suggest here?

 

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Balance is a BTRFS maintenance function (the NAS uses the BTRFS file system).  Scrub is both a BTRFS and a RAID maintenance function.

Personally I run one of these tests each month, cycling through them 3x a year.  Scrub requires accessing all the data on all the disks, so it also serves as a disk test.  So I run those 2 months apart.  For instance,

• Disk Test (Jan, May, Sept)
• Balance (Feb, June, Oct)
• Scrub (Mar, July, Nov)
• Defrag (Apr, Aug, Dec)

This is done on a schedule, so I don't need to remember to run them. 

Disk Test and Scrub can take a couple of days, and the RN104 won't be as responsive when they are running. Balance and Defrag complete very quickly on my NAS (minutes), but the time needed does depend on your usage pattern.  Generally the less frequently you run them, the longer they take.

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Kiptanoi_New wrote:

3)

And finaly this backup thing...

How do I setup a good backup for my nas?

 

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Backing up to USB drives is a reasonable way.  One potential risk - if there is a power surge, then the backup drive might also fail due to the surge.  Another is physical loss - theft, fire, etc would result in losing both the backup and the NAS.  One way to defend against that is to make a full backup onto another drive every now and then, and store that somewhere off site.  If you don't have a lot of data, you could also use cloud backup (though that can be hard to set up for a NAS).

The backups can be set to run incrementally (and mine are).  But they will always run, and compare the files on the NAS with what is on the disk.  Then update anything that is out-of-date.

One potential annoyance is deleted files.  The normal backup jobs won't remove any files you delete from the USB disks for incremental backups.  There is a setting to delete everything on the backup and start fresh every now and then, which would help with that.  There is also a workaround, though it can be a bit tricky to set up.

Also, make sure you use a disk format that you can read from your PC, since if the NAS fails you'll need to do that.  NTFS is the best available option,

Note you can also connect the backup disk to a Windows PC, and back up the data from the PC (instead of using the NAS backup jobs).  FreeFileSync is one free tool that can do incremental backups from the PC (and which can be scheduled).