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I have had multiple previous generations of ReadyNAS using OS4 and OS5, for full system backup i simply backed up "/c" to an external USB drive. This copied all shares and user home areas, restore was quite straightforward except user permissions had to be reset. Fine.
I now also have a RN214 running OS6 v6.10.3. I have a handful of users with home areas, and a bunch of shares. What I want to do is backup all data so that I can restore in the event of disaster or major upgrade/migration. Ideally to an external USB drive for safety reasons.
I read the backup FAQ, which well covers backups - but not restore (except one FAQ that copies from external USB back to the NAS, but that is for large data copy not full NAS restore). I searched the forums, and at page 15 I had got back to early 2019 and I gave up.. and used google to fine specific OS6 backup/restore.
Ok, I don't need to link every article, but after reading through quite a lot of information including a brief discussion in another thread a few months back, I am now quite concerned that deploying RN214 with OS6 is going to be difficult to backup/restore, or should I say seems to require multiple backup jobs (one per share and one per user home area), but please tell me if I've got this wrong - and I hope I have because this will be very inconvenient and clumsy.
Are you planning to back up everything to a single USB drive? Or do you need multiple USB drives for the correct capacity?
Personally I've done share-by-share backup to other NAS myself (though restore is a bit simpler for me because I don't use home folders). But you can specify /data (or whatever your volume name is) as the local source or destination of a backup job. So you can restore everything after you re-create the shares and home folders.
The challenge with bare-metal restore is re-creating the NAS home folders before you restore. Accessing the NAS with each user's credentials is a pain (and of course you might not know their password). But you can log in with ssh, and then use rnutil mkhomedir_helper username to create it.
I believe the general procedure for you to do a bare-metal restore would be to
do a factory install on the NAS
reinstall the apps (needed before restoring the configuration)
Are you planning to back up everything to a single USB drive? Or do you need multiple USB drives for the correct capacity?
Personally I've done share-by-share backup to other NAS myself (though restore is a bit simpler for me because I don't use home folders). But you can specify /data (or whatever your volume name is) as the local source or destination of a backup job. So you can restore everything after you re-create the shares and home folders.
The challenge with bare-metal restore is re-creating the NAS home folders before you restore. Accessing the NAS with each user's credentials is a pain (and of course you might not know their password). But you can log in with ssh, and then use rnutil mkhomedir_helper username to create it.
I believe the general procedure for you to do a bare-metal restore would be to
do a factory install on the NAS
reinstall the apps (needed before restoring the configuration)
As of now, I have an 8TB Seagate external USB 3.0 drive, my data fits (using just over 6TB for a full backup).
I will play with /data (or my {volume name}, which is different) as you suggest, that bit wasn't obvious to me, looks like we have a potential solution. Actually, I just SSH'd into the RN214, and looked at the structure under the volume and this is exactly what I need. However, from the backup webif, selecting the volume folder only shows shares below that, home folders are shown separately at the top level, so I wasn't sure they'd be included in the backup of the volume. I'll now try backup and see what I get. I also note your comment on the user home folder creation issue (which I can workaround). Thanks for the tips.
I do believe full backup/restore is important to some users, the FAQ should capture this (perhaps Netgear can update the FAQ). We also need a simpler full restore process, if this can be fed back to the product team.
I confirm a backup of volume includes home folders (although not shown as included in the webif), and that's what I needed. This should be much easier than I feared, other than the user home folders issue mentioned above.
