Backup assistance

rmurgz wrote:
It's interesting that you back-up from NAS shares to USB drives via a PC

Well, not quite.

My backup policy is to have 3 local copies of everything (primary + two backups). My initial strategy was to put one copy on two older ReadyNAS (an NV+ v1 and a duo v1) - neither big enough to hold it all. The second copy is on internal disk drives split across two PCs. I actually don't back up at all to USB drives - I used to do that (pre-NAS) but didn't find them to be that reliable.

As my two v1 backup NAS are aging, I am planning to transition to doing complete backups to two newer entry-level NAS (using 6 TB jbod volumes). That is still in the works. I'll continue to back up to the older NAS and the PCs as long as they are functional, but as disks and hardware fail, I will retire them. So my going-forward backup approach will be exclusively NAS->NAS.

I also use crashplan for disaster recovery. I view that as inexpensive insurance if something catastrophic happens - not sure at this point if I'd trust it as my only backup. Though it has been reliable over the past two years, I am still concerned about business shakeouts in the cloud business overall.

rmurgz wrote:
... another reason to upgrade from N to AC wireless.

I honestly don't see the connection here. I've been using 802.11ac for a couple of years now. When you are close to the access point, there is a speed advantage, but that drops off quickly as you get further away.

In practice it never actually gets to gigabit speeds, and like all wifi it suffers from packet loss. I happened to test my transfer speeds with the NAS this morning. Over 802.11ac, about 30 feet away from the AP I was getting around 8 MB/s. There are some obstacles (the chimney being one), and the best path might require going through 2 exterior (but wood) walls.