Backup solutions

GordonTarling · Oct 21, 2011

We have a small home network, which uses a Netgear NAS for storage - it uses two 1.5tb drives in RAID configuration and is almost at 50% capacity at the moment. The problem I'm having is finding a fast and reliable way to back up the data on this NAS. I did try connecting a USB hard drive to the NAS and using the NAS' built in backup software, but after 24 hours, it was less than 1/3 of the way through. Simple and low cost suggestions welcomed!

balge · Oct 21, 2011

eSATA is way faster than USB, try eSATA?
Is the RAID mirror or stripe? Even 750Gb is a lot of data, it will take time...
cheers

whitenemesis · Oct 21, 2011

What about NTI Shadow? Netgear even have their on 'flavour' for use with their ReadyNAS units. Works well for me, still quite slow though ...

John · Oct 21, 2011

750GB is a lot of data.

It sounds like you need something that does a block level synchronise.

I recently bought a pair of Synology boxes to store our company backups on.

It allows you to synchronise a folder with block level changes instead of having to copy the whole lot over again - which would mean anything that has changed (delta).

I don't use block level yet as our backups currently run at 250GB per day which syncs very quickly (couple of hours).

What I have learnt is our previous Iomega boxes are very slow in comparison and they used to take all day to sync.

GordonTarling · Oct 22, 2011

Thanks for the helpful replies everyone!

Balge - I agree that eSATA would be faster, but there's nowhere to connect one.

whitenemesis - I'm looking into NTI Shadow - if it's slow, that's fine, I can just leave it to do its thing.

JohnEBoy - Block level synchronise? Now you're talking technical! Something else I'll be looking into today.

Colin_b · Oct 22, 2011

The built in backup utility in Windows 7 is excellent.

Acronis True Image is also good (v 11, rather than the latest version which is rather bloated)

Finally Second Copy is worth a look.

Personally, I use W7 backup for regular backups, and Acronis for disaster recovery backups to a USB hdd I keep away from home.

@MARK · Oct 22, 2011

CRASHPLAN

This gives you 2 options

Option 1 - Free

Allows you to back up any machine to any other machine either locally or in another location. It has good bandwidth control, only backs up changes and has a neat interface.

Option 2 - Paid For

Lets you back up to the Crashplan servers so in the event that your house burns down or floods, you have not lost all your data because your backups were in the same building as the original data.

Backing up to a NAS etc that is local does not protect you against fire, floods, quakes or burglars and if the data is valuable enough for you to consider backing up in the first place then it's probably worth paying out some money to back it up properly.

The downside is that the first backup will take weeks depending on your broadband connection but once done, each incremental backup will take minutes.

There are other services out there such as Mozy but Crashplan is the only one I have found to date that doesn't cap usage or throttle uploads. You can also run both options 1 and 2 as above at the same time so one bit of software can back up to the cloud and locally in one go.

balge · Oct 22, 2011

GordonTarling said:
Thanks for the helpful replies everyone!

Balge - I agree that eSATA would be faster, but there's nowhere to connect one.

whitenemesis - I'm looking into NTI Shadow - if it's slow, that's fine, I can just leave it to do its thing.

JohnEBoy - Block level synchronise? Now you're talking technical! Something else I'll be looking into today.

Nowhere on the NAS? You can get breakout cards if there's no eSATA on your PC? Not exactly 'enterprise' grade hardware, you won't get enterprise type performance
cheers!

Acronis is good, as is Easeus but it sounds like data transmission is your issue not software....
plus a mirrored array will not not read/write as fast as a striped array, also require very good RAID controller to get the best out of any array

balge · Oct 22, 2011

Colin_b said:
The built in backup utility in Windows 7 is excellent.

Find that statement hard to justify...it works but hardly excellent? been a bit flakey when I've used it?
cheers!

John · Oct 22, 2011

GordonTarling said:
JohnEBoy - Block level synchronise? Now you're talking technical! Something else I'll be looking into today.

Sorry - when you synchronise a folder, typically it will compare source and destination and copy over what is not the same at a 'file' level i.e. the level you can see.

When you sychonise using block level, it works at a 'lower level' so is faster and is effectively incremental (only what has changed in terms of blocks of data, not whole files).

This is more efficient and faster because of that.

Ours transfers 250GB in around 5 hours, not 2 like I thought - so 750GB would be 15 hours or there abouts.

However, I suspect you do not change 750GB per day, so a file synchronise would mean just the changes at file level, so that should be much quicker than copying the whole lot again.

balge · Oct 22, 2011

Hmm, if you are using W7 backup it does full backups by default...do you really need to back up the whole disk? If you just want system restore you don't need to back up the whole disk, check the options in Backup. If you want backup storage of data just save it straight to the NAS?

Incremental backup vs differential backup: difference and benefits of each one

Windows7 Backup not doing incremental

cheers

GordonTarling · Oct 25, 2011

Thanks for the suggestions - looking into most of those!

@Mark - Crashplan sounds promising - further investigation required.

Balge - yes, my PC has eSATA, but the NAS doesn't. Therefore, anything has to run at network speed. I've been using Acronis True Image, but it's not designed to back up the NAS and I've had all sorts of issues with it. I've had hard drives fail in the past, so the RAID has to be mirrored!

JohnEBoy - Most of the data on the NAS is photos, so not much changes daily. Block level synchronise might be the answer. Is there any software you could recommend?

Balge - I've been bitten by hard drive failures in the past, so my current scheme is hopefully designed to avoid major loss of data. My PC and wifey's laptop both use the NAS to store all data - this is mirrored RAID, so hopefully one drive failing won't cause me to lose the lot. What I've been doing is backing up the data on the NAS to a 2tb harddrive that fits in a caddy on my PC - this hard drive then gets swapped once a month with another and then it's stored in a safe place.

whitenemesis · Oct 25, 2011

NTI Shadow can do continuous incremental back ups. So once the initial back up is done the software monitors each file and will do an incremental back up as soon as any change is saved. So pretty fast after the initial copy. Runs continuously in the background, so never misses an update. You can also select to retain the last n versions.

John · Oct 25, 2011

whitenemesis said:
NTI Shadow can do continuous incremental back ups. So once the initial back up is done the software monitors each file and will do an incremental back up as soon as any change is saved. So pretty fast after the initial copy. Runs continuously in the background, so never misses an update. You can also select to retain the last n versions.

This is going to be your best bet IMO also.

The NAS boxes I refer to sync to each other using internal software.

They do not have client software (I used Windows Server Backup 2008 and Retrospect).

You need something that runs on the PC like the above and writes to a NAS.

Antharro · Oct 25, 2011

On a different note - are you using the two 1.5Tb discs in a striped array (so 3Tb total), or mirrored (1.5Tb total)? If you're striping them, I'd very very strongly recommend against - if one disc fails then you could potentially lose all your data.

John · Oct 26, 2011

Looks like it is configured as RAID1 so he should be OK - unless really unlucky.

I would always have 2 backups personally, but a lot of people call me paranoid. However, RAID1 or any other reslient RAID does NOT prevent data corruption on the disks or failure through accidental deletion.

GordonTarling said:
Balge - I've been bitten by hard drive failures in the past, so my current scheme is hopefully designed to avoid major loss of data. My PC and wifey's laptop both use the NAS to store all data - this is mirrored RAID, so hopefully one drive failing won't cause me to lose the lot.

Cabe · Oct 26, 2011

What?

Antharro · Oct 26, 2011

Mmm, missed that, my bad. SyncToy's not bad but with that volume of data will take a darn long time - I would imagine a day or so.

GordonTarling · Oct 26, 2011

Update - Tried NTI Shadow - waste of time - it crashed after restarting a previous part backup. Tried Goodsync - worked OK on one share on the NAS, but it didn't like my starting a backup of a second share. Crashplan won't find anything but a drive on the computer it's installed on, so of no use. Downloading Synctoy now, so we'll see what that does!

whitenemesis · Oct 26, 2011

Sorry to hear your experience with NTI Shadow. Was this from Netgear, their version for ReadyNAS?

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