How do I back up a NAS?

I have my music files stored on a NAS, and have been manually backing them up to a USB-connected drive. Does anyone know of any software that will recognize and back up a NAS to a local drive? I use SuperDuper and Time Machine on my Mac, but neither will see or back up a NAS. Grateful for any advice!

 

That's weird. I use Acronis to back up the NAS on an external drive and to the cloud. But I'm a PC user so perhaps it's because once mapped the software treat shared folders on a NAS just like local disks and partitions.

 

Best practices is to have the NAS in a RAID array, and automatically back up to a cloud storage provider like Dropbox/Amazon/etc. Backing up spinning discs to other spinning discs isn't really the way to go here.

 

Good advice. But I have 4TB of files, and I'm looking for a local backup method for quick recovery.

 

what brand NAS?
Usually they have backup software that you can install on the NAS itself- Synology has like 5 different options for backing up, I use amazon glacier now, got 14 TB up there from my NAS

 

He's not looking to to it the standard way it seems. As best I can tell he wants to back up a NAS to a PC, despite that being sort of a Data Anathema. Different strokes I suppose.

 

destination really doesn't matter- local or cloud, built in software could be a solution.

 

4TB backup to the cloud?

That's a lot of recovery time, depending on the b/w, not to mention being 'hostage' to a reliable connection.

 

Sure, but I get the sense from his first post he's already doing it that way - every NAS can do a local rsync. OP, if you're not, definitely look into the apps on the NAS that do this.

 

It's a shame your internet connection sucks so bad you have to warn people of this non-problem every time it comes up.

 

Even so, 4TB would take a long time to recover from.

Maybe the OP values speed of recovery.

A true disaster recovery plan would include both local and off site storage.

 

I use Carbon Copy Cloner. Backs up my Synology to external hard drives connected to my iMac.

Your Nas might have inbuilt s/w to do this but you might need to have the usb drives plugged into your Nas rather than your computer. I think that's how Synology does it IIRC

 

Even my connection, which is pretty fast would take awhile to recover from. I'd have my 2nd offsite back up on a cloud no problem but as your main, unless you don't mind waiting for a long time I'd have a local back up no question.

Even our connection at work which would blow any home connection away, normally, would take ages .

 

Why? The cloud is nothing more than a bunch of drives in another location. While I have nothing against cloud storage I use a combination of discs and tape to back up my most valuable data. It is certainly inconvenient, but I don't really trust cloud security long-term. Every company under the sun is constantly being probed by hackers and in many instances the bigger data breaches haven't been revealed for months............

 

Isn’t your NAS capable of Raid 1 striping? Or is it a single drive unit? I would just get a two (or more) drive unit and configure it to Raid 1. Some of these are hot swappable...so if a drive goes south, you just pop another one in. I’m actually looking to set one up now. Not sure what to get....probably a Synology.

 

Whatch NAS? I have a synology 1813+, that I use to back up my photo archive and music files. I use Carbon Copy Cloner. The volumes, your NAS, has to be mounted on the desktop. Then it should be available to your cloning software. I added the volume to my login items so it gets mounted automatically.

However, unless your NAS is unreachable, you should just use the usb or whatever port your NAS has and the supplied software to back up the NAS. That way you don’t have to clog your network unnecessarily.

Good luck
mdr

 

That is not a backup.

 

That’s true. You really need something stored at another location.

 

Set your NAS up as mirrored. Done.

 

But that is akin to RAID 1, and that isn't a 'backup'.

 

Technically, if you have two copies of the same exact thing, it's a backup.

 

If it's a real NAS and not just an appliance without lots of features, set up scheduled rsync to a duplicate NAS onsite. If it's an even better NAS, such as one you can install for free on dedicated PC hardware, it will have a versioning/snapshot file system that can protect against deletions and alterations like a backup, and identify data errors with checksumming even when not using a RAID array.

Cloud backup is impractical, because the backup is not as important as recovery. If you've got an internet connection with a 1TB data cap monthly, for example, it might take you 8 months to get your data back.

 

I would think the annual cost for 4TB of online storage would be enough for a few hard drives. 8TB archival type internal hard drives are currently just $216.

 

But it the case of disk mirroring, whatever happens to the primary also happens to the mirror.

If you inadvertently delete a file, it's gone. If the file system gets corrupted, it's gone.

We've had these type of threads before; RAID is NOT a backup strategy. RAID enhances/preserves data access in the event of a disk failure, but it isn't a backup.

 

Yep you've got me there. Unless you remove one of the mirrored drives immediately after it's done setting up