Re: Need some advice, overall backup strategy, CCC and TM not working wireless or wired RN104

k4heines · ‎2016-05-06

I've tried many things, but am still not getting successful backups after 6 months.

RN104 with 4 Toshiba 4TB drives meant for NAS systems, OS 6.4. For household use with 2 Windows PC, 2 Macs. For today, i'm focusing on my iMac, with a 3 TB internal drive, a 3 TB external, and a 256 GB external SSD.

Things I've already tried that have failed (again, just thining of the Mac environement right now)

Time Machine backups. Seemed to work for a while, but they became corrupt. ReadyNas was connected via wire to my home wifi router (Netgear AC 1900). My computer was connected wirelessly. I learned that wireless Time Machine backups were unreliable, even with plain hard drives and Apple software.
Carbon Copy Cloner. Still talking about wireless connection right now. I created sparsebundles and sparseimages on a shared folder on the RN. I think this worked for a few months without error, then CCC kept giving me errors of being unable to write to the shared volume. Then I connected my RN directly to my iMac. It can't access the internet, but that's okay i think. My intention is to make a complete backup of all my iMac's hard drives, then do incremental backups wirelessly. However, CCC keeps displaying errors, with drives not being accessible, and that the drives may be failing. I doubt that. I like CCC alot, but can't get past the errors.
Started poking around with rsync and remote ssh. I don't mind using terminal, and am okay with scripting and Automator. Saw some recommendations to start the rsync process from the RN side, which would be much more efficient than pushing from my Mac.

I have been using the Mac desktop app, and it's working fine. Select folders sync well. Is the desktop app suitable for whole drive backups?

My iMac by far has the most amount of data in our household, with many photos and videos. Ideally I would want to have incremental backups from my Mac, but I could live with just a straight copy of what's on my drives (like rsync) since I also have backblaze runing for my iMac (unlimited storage). On average, I probably change 1-25 GB of data per week. Most of my data sits unchanged. If I'm only backup up files via RN then I should probably maintain a local hard drive for Time Machine, for a system restore....right? My iMac still has the recovery partition, plus my iMac works well in target disk mode when connected with my MacBook.

My fear is that there is no reliable solution over a wireless network. I can't keep the RN isolated from the network forever, since I also need it to backup the other computers. I want to make initial backups (using whatever method is best) to the RN while connected with the ethernet cable, then move ito the router and continue backups wirelessly. I also know it needs upgarding to 6.5 soon.

WINDOWS

I have used the windows desktop app, but ran into errors backing up Windows Backup images on an external drive, regarding permissions, and ran into other errors as well. I can't seem to find the list of files that errored out, so I have low confidence the selected files are actually being backed up.

I also tried sharing the drives from Windows, and trying to pull data from them to RN, but could never get a successful connection.

What is the best way to take data from the Windows computers and put it on the RN so it's a reliable backup? I don't believe I need a bootable copy, just the files. I've seen suggested to make a disk image of the entire drive(s) every 4-6 months, to be sure to catch everything including system files. Is the Windows 10 backup utility a good way to do that?

SUMMARY

6 months later, i'm left with many more quesitons than answers. Hoping for a simple solution like "use the desktop apps to sync your entire computers". done! ... if other users or Netgear could tell me that's reliable for backup and restore, that's fine. But, if rsync is faster, I would want to try that. I know RN is not fast, but I want the fastest method that isn't going to give me errors over wifi. I really don't want to run ethernet cable through my house.

meverz · ‎2016-05-08

Yeah, I have been having the same issues with TM backups of my MacBook over wireless. As far as I can tell, it seems to work fine via ethernet to my RN104, but when backingup over wireless the backup becomes corrupt.

I also have a Mac mini which TM backiups to the RN104, and I don't have a problem with them (a wired conection, with wirelss ALWAYS off), so it obviously is a problem with TM over wireless. Although I can TM backup from my MacBook TO the Mac mini with no issues (even over wireless). When the TM Backup of my BackBook on the RN104 gets corrupted, I delete it and copy the MacBook TM Backup from the Mac Mini across, and it all seems to work fine.

I have just installed Arq (arqbackup.com) on my MacBook, using it to backup to the RN104. I have only in the past few days got it set up properly, and it seems to be working fine. It can take some fiddling to get set up - it can backup via SFTP (which I found out is NOT the same as FTPS), which requires enabling root SSH access. The first time I got the path wrong, and quickly filled up my OS partiton, but I think i have got it sorted now. It's still in the trial stage, I'll reevaluate when my 30 day trial period is up. Arq is also available for windows, so you can use the same program for both.

I'm not sure why CCC isn't working. I use (the very similar) SuperDuper, and I have not had any problems backing up to a network drive. Although I haven't yet tested rolling backups, I mainly use it to store a clone of my Hard Drive before major installations (bootcamp, OS Upgrades, OS reinstall etc) in case something goes wrong.

mdgm-ntgr · ‎2016-05-09

Perhaps I could try a backend settings change to see if that helps with CCC backups over SMB. PM me if interested.

k4heines · ‎2016-05-15

Thanks for the reponse!

I have seen many separate accounts of wireless backups altogether being unreliable. Reference this article.

Yet, I have hope that I can get CCC to work. Glad to hear SuperDuper is working for you. What the approximate total size of what youre backing up with SuperDuper to the network drive?

How is Arq working so far? Are you backing up to a folder on your NAS, while connected via SMB? Or are you using SFTP? SFTP is intriguing to me, as you could presumably backup computers to your NAS from outside of your home network. I like the simplicity of using the same program for Mac and Windows!

mdgm-ntgr · ‎2016-05-23

Replied to your PM.