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Backup to TWO external USB Hard Drives ONE at a time for off-site storage
So as the subject says. I'm succesfully backing up the NAS every night on schedule to ONE USB drive at a customer's premises.
After speaking to the customer the question was:
Can we add a SECOND external hard drive to the mix - keeping one off-site and swapping the drives occasionally?
Fair question - nothing in the manual though and no CLEAR answer as to my model/firmware on how this is achieved (if at all).
So to clarify - will it work if I simpyl walk in Friday afternoon, unplug the curent external USB off the front USB (next to the backup button), plug in the SECOND external USB drive to the SAME port and walk off? And vice versa a week or month from now?
Or is there another way I need to set this up?
Thanks for your attention. There seems to be no way to set up like a "Backup Storage Pool" or anything on this device.
Re: Backup to TWO external USB Hard Drives ONE at a time for off-site storage
I suggest creating a single backup job that specifies the USB port as the destination (and not the drive). There are some firmware versions that won't allow this selection if you have the drive inserted - so you might want to eject the drive first.
I don't do backups this way, so you will want to test it to make sure it works as expected.
If you want to prune out deleted files on the NAS, you can specify rsync as the protocol, and specify the source as remote instead of local (using 127.0.0.1 as the host address). Then you will get incremental backups, and you should see an option to delete files not present on the source.
FWIW, if you specify a local source and destination, the backup job will use linux cp, not rsync.
Re: Backup to TWO external USB Hard Drives ONE at a time for off-site storage
Hello Ramrunner,
Welcome to the community!
If you want to use another USB drive on another USB port of the NAS to backup the same source, you will still need to configure it. I think it is best you configure the Backup Button first then use the same port where you will unplug the first USB drive so you will just need to push the backup button on the unit itself to make it start.
When configuring Backup Job with USB drive, use the options USB front, USB bottom, front or back.
Re: Backup to TWO external USB Hard Drives ONE at a time for off-site storage
I have been doing basically this for years at home, but its slightly more complicated to get it to work right.
For clarity, I'm doing this on a 600. Firmware has changed so this may or may not be true on later models.
I have 2 external drives that exceed the capacity of the RAID in the NAS. I switch them periodically for the purpose of being paranoid about having 2 drives fail in the NAS (which has happened) and the external backup drive failing at the same time. (which hasn't happened). I just plug in the other drive and then go reconfigure the backups to use the new drive instead of the old, as they have different names in the interface.
But, the trick is that when you swap the drives you need to reformat the drive being switched in because the rsync (which I only reasonably assume is what is being used) does not utilizes the remove the files that no longer exist in the source drive/folder option. So, without a reformat, you end up with lots of straggler (deleted) or duplicate (moved) files. I do it infrequently enough where waiting for a reformat isn't really a problem.
What might be a problem is how long the new backup takes to run. It has to do the whole drive, which for me runs at USB 2 speeds. I happen to be in the middle of a switch right now. The inital backup is at 48 hours and running. Not a problem for me, but in a business situation, how much data (days) is acceptable to lose? If you have 2 USB ports, it would seem that you could let the backup continue incremental backups which the new drive is being built. If you want to maintain an absolute offsite backup in case of say fire, you would need a 3 drive rotation.
I kinda do this for a living as a hedge fund CTO. But there its done in a more enterprise compliant way as opposed to the readynas products. Not that the readynas is bad, I own 2. But you spend more on higher MTBF products with 4 hour response times in an enterprise environment.
Re: Backup to TWO external USB Hard Drives ONE at a time for off-site storage
I suggest creating a single backup job that specifies the USB port as the destination (and not the drive). There are some firmware versions that won't allow this selection if you have the drive inserted - so you might want to eject the drive first.
I don't do backups this way, so you will want to test it to make sure it works as expected.
If you want to prune out deleted files on the NAS, you can specify rsync as the protocol, and specify the source as remote instead of local (using 127.0.0.1 as the host address). Then you will get incremental backups, and you should see an option to delete files not present on the source.
FWIW, if you specify a local source and destination, the backup job will use linux cp, not rsync.
Re: Backup to TWO external USB Hard Drives ONE at a time for off-site storage
Not quite what I was looking for I think.
To clarify - I'd really like ONE backup job. For a week or so I have external drive #1 attached. Then every (lets say) Friday, I swap it with USB drive number 2 on the SAME PORT (and vice versa the next week) so one drive can be kept off-site. The external drives are big enough to accomodate multiple full backups.
Ideally I'd like the Netgear to IGNORE the fact it is a different drive attached and just follow the normal procedures of 1 full backup, 6 differentials per week.
From what I'm reading the Netgear will recognise the two drives as seperate drives, which causes problems.
I should say this is on a customer's site who have NO idea about anything so anything that requires reconfiguring or even logging in to the web interface is not really ideal.
I do this on WDSENTINEL units without a problem as Windows Storage Server seems to understand what my requirements are but from what I'm reading this will fail on a Netgear device???
Re: Backup to TWO external USB Hard Drives ONE at a time for off-site storage
StephenB, I think this is exactly what I want. It's unfortunate this is an untested solution as you specify, because going to the customer with "this might work", and charging them for the external drive and some on-site labour setting it up could back fire, but your solution is most definitely the exact sort of thing I want. The customer simply swaps drives out once a week (or month whatever they decide), without having to know any nitty gritty.
Can someone chime in and confirm they've done this with the 4.x series firmware on the model I mentioned and it works? Sounds like it's worth a try anyway as the logic is sound, but if someone's done this and it work by all means chime in for customer reassurance.
It's unfortunate this is an untested solution as you specify,
I just want to clarify a couple things. I don't work for Netgear, so you aren't my customer - I'm just sharing an approach which I believe will work. This is a community forum, not just a netgear support forum.
Also, I have no idea if Netgear tests this particular solution or not. I haven't tried it, because I've chosen to use NAS->NAS backup myself, not USB
