Backing up home NAS

jamoor · 31 May 2010 at 09:14

At the moment I have a home NAS with all my important data on it, I also have DVD backups of this at work.

What I want to do is have another NAS box at work, this will allow me to
1) Sync the important data onto my computer at work for more backups.
2) provide a remote backup of my data already on my nas at home.

How can I implement this?

I have a ReadyNAS duo at home, I want it to synchronise with the NAS I hope to purchase and install at work.

I have noticed some Rsync thing, but I am unsure if its suitable?

Anyone help me on this, I dont really want to install software on computers either and would rather have it all automated between the NAS drives.

jamoor · 14 Jun 2010 at 18:54

I really like the look of synology, anyone able to help me out here on what I can do?

I think I can use ftp to backup remotely as well.

wonder_lander · 15 Jun 2010 at 23:49

Take a look at crashplan

JonJ678 · 16 Jun 2010 at 02:17

Rsync is brilliant. Its almost ridiculous how good it is. Entirely suitable for the purpose, its even been ported to windows now. For the first copy its worth connecting them locally, as many gb over internet will take a long time.

jamoor · 17 Jun 2010 at 11:13

JonJ678 said:
Rsync is brilliant. Its almost ridiculous how good it is. Entirely suitable for the purpose, its even been ported to windows now. For the first copy its worth connecting them locally, as many gb over internet will take a long time.

how does this work out of interest?

I have the 2 nas boxes how do I get them to sync :S

JonJ678 · 17 Jun 2010 at 16:13

To some extent it depends on how they're arranged. Life's also rather easier if at least one is running linux of some sort, as then you don't have to deal with the eccentricities of the windows port. Based on your description in the OP, the easiest approach will be:

Run some variant of linux on the work nas
Install an rsync daemon on the windows computer (there's a few, e.g. deltacopy)
Periodically run rysnc on the nas to pull data from the other two computers
Cron or Acron are programs, under linux, which will run rsync at whatever intervals you wish

This is a concise summary. Rsync moves data from one machine to another over ssh, so it's generally secure. It only copies the changed parts of the data, so bandwidth requirements are small after the first transfer. It'll pull data from a different machine, or push data onto a different machine.

There's a lot of options to use with it, detailed here. One of the most useful is compression, and whether or not to delete files from the backup if they're now missing from the source.

I've not set it up using windows yet, only between linux boxes. It may be possible to avoid installing anything on the windows box if required, e.g. if you share the folder you want to backup over the network, linux can access this share and backup data that way. Window's file sharing over the internet isn't a good plan though.

I'm meaning to start backing up the missus' laptop, which runs XP, using rsync soon. So if you don't make progress with the above I'll be able to provide more detail shortly.

Cheers