Backup NAS to an external drive on USB port

[jpjpjp]

Hi there,

Has anyone in this forum found a suitable method to backing up their NAS to an external USB drive. (Poor man's raid I suppose).

I used to back up my machines to local USB hard drives and then run windows based software to back them all up to the NAS. Now I've got a Mac in the mix and am thinking it would be more efficient to just back up everyone to the NAS and have a backup of that as well.

It isn't immediately obvious to me how to do this, so if someone is already doing something like this and willing to share a recipe I'd appreciate it!

Cheers!

[Jocko]

Hi jpjpjp,

(Poor man's raid I suppose)

:disapprove raid is not in any case a method to backup data. (RAID users should also backup their data but many forget it and there is nothing he could do about it if the raid can not be recovered :cry: ...)

To backup data on the NAS, you can use 2 ways:
A/ do a backup handled by each host on a NAS share
B/ backup handled by the NAS.

For A, there are many ways to do it :
- create a network drive on each Microsoft host, and use a software to schedule the backup (I think it is your current way)
- for MAC, enable afp server on the nas with a Time machine share to backup directly
- enable the rsync server and use a software may use an rsync server

For B,
with Microsoft hosts,
- you must enable the sharing feature on your folders
- mount these remote shares on your NAS
- from these remote shares to a NAS share, set your backups and schedule them with cron.
With MAC,
- enable samba access on the wanted resources
- mount these remote samba ressources on your NAS
- from these remote shares to a NAS share, set your backups and schedule them with cron.

To backup data from the NAS to an USB drive:
- just stay plug in the USB drive
- from the nas share backup to the USB share and schedule it with cron.