Help backing up 6TB

djmsemcgrath

I have a NAS box (a Synology DS212j) which has two 4TB hard drives inside. I've filled up about 6TB of it so far. It has just dawned on me that I don't have another copy of these files, so if something happens to the NAS box, I'll lose it all.

I do have quite a few external USB hard drives around the place - I have two 4TB Seagate drives, and four 2TB Western Digital drives.

So, my plan is to backup the 6TB of files onto the two Seagate drives, and also onto the four WD drives, so I'll have 3 copies of the files.

I access the NAS files using Mapped Network Drives on my laptop.

The only way I can think of doing this backup is to plug the USB hard drive into my laptop, select around 3.4TB worth of files (even though the Seagate is 4TB, there's only around 3.6TB usuable, and it's probably best not to fill it 100%) off the NAS, and drag-and-drop, and let Windows copy the files. I've plugged my laptop into my router using a cable to try and speed it up but it's still super slow.

WiFi had a transfer speed of around 5MB/sec, and wired has a speed of around 12Mb/sec. I think because the files are going from the NAS box (which is wired into my router) over the network to my laptop, and then onto a USB connected device, the speed just gets reduced. I have seen speeds of around 40/50Mb/sec when it's going direct from NAS to Laptop, so the USB element must be slowing it down. It is using USB 3 though.

Anyway, at current speeds, and using my basic maths skills, it'll take around 139 hours. (6TB is around 6,000,000 MB, which divided by 12Mb/sec equals 500,000 seconds, which divided by 3600 equals 139 hours).

Is there any way at all of speeding this up? Doing it this way obviously means that the two backups will get out of sync almost immediately, so I had planned to do this labourious task every 2-3 months or so. My files aren't critical enough to need to do weekly backups - every few months would be fine, although obviously, if there's a way to automatically sync somehow, that would be the ideal solution.

I did look at online backups to try and achieve this automatic sync, but Google Drive charges about £250 per month for 6TB storage. I looked at CrashPlan which seemed to offer unlimited storage for a fairly cheap monthly price, only a few pounds, but from downloading their free trial, I couldn't use it for backing up from a NAS, it only worked from local files.

Does anyone have any advice for me?

pappa_golf

incredibly slow ,


if using a usb caddy set it to "enable write caching"


better method would be to borrow/beg a desktop and a Ethernet cable , plug your drive into spare on PC and copy by wire

debitcardmayhem

Can't you plug in the drives via USB to the synology , does the manual not help ?

djmsemcgrath

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Can't you plug in the drives via USB to the synology , does the manual not help ?

Hmm, I didn't think of that. The Synology does have some USB ports, I might experiment with that later. Since your post, I've read a few posts on the Synology forum on this topic, and it appears that it will work, however, some problems do exist.

It looks like the system is set up to backup all files to a USB drive attached, however, if all the files are bigger than the USB drive, it fails. It doesn't allow you to backup just specified folders.

Also, there's reports of incredibly slow speeds anyway.

I'll still try when I'm home and see if I can get around these problems - it's a good suggestion.

Does anyone have any experience with the unlimited online storage options - I imagine the initial backup of 6TB would take even longer if it's backing up over the internet? But it might have the benefit of the backup being frequently updated.

S0litaire

Unlimited online storage is very hard to find these days!

Amazon AWS Glacier service (Long term storage of data not accessed a lot) would cost you around $45 for the first month (to upload 6Tb to the cloud servers) and a few $ every month to upload/Download data. (Depending on how often you access it)

At those prices it might be easy to pick up a dirt cheap NAS like the D-Link DNS-320L (£42 used on amazon) slap in what ever 2 disks you can get into it and use it as a back up NAS you only need to turn on to run backups!

Also do a bit of spring cleaning! What type of file are on the NAS? take a few weeks to go through everything and check their are no excess duplicates of stuff. or Things you can easily download again. Or documents you could compress into zip or rar files.

I had to back up my NAS (6TB total 2.5Tb used!) to a 3Tb drive on my main PC (Changing the NAS from Rain 0 to RAID 1) so needed all the data off so the 2 x 3Tb drives could be formatted and set to mirror each other! That took 3 days on and off to move via 100Mbps network.

As for CrashPlan take a read at this :

http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Troubleshooting/Real-Time_Backup_For_Network-Attached_Drives
http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Backup/Backing_Up_A_Windows_Network_Drive

bluesnake

you could build your own nas box no2 and sync to that? Possibly cheaper using an old second hand PC with large drives in it.

Other ways are LTO tapes, but will probably be more expensive than above but long term cheaper than online? If you drop a tape, the data is often corrupted.

My question is that if you use online, if you have 3 files a, b, c. If b gets deleted, then the backup syncs, and only then you notice file b has gone, can you get it back? If you can get b back you will you end up using more than 6T, as changes are therefore tracked. If changes are not tracked, when bit rot, corruption, and viruses occur, if not recognised quick enough will cause you to loose data. Say you get Ransom-ware virus, you backup cost could double, because the size has doubled, or you could end up replacing the good files with the virus ones.

Your data is not in the cloud, but is stored on someone else's computer, so you are at their mercy.

GabbaGabbaHey

Whatever method you choose (personally, I'd probably go for plugging the drives directly into the Synology's USB ports and letting it backup overnight), make sure that you store the backup in a different building to your NAS.

The last thing you want is a fire/flood/theft/whatever meaning that you lose your main data and your backup.

esuhl

I use FreeFileSync, which has the same effect as dragging-and-dropping files, but it won't copy files that already exist, and has better error handling.

You can set it up to create a "mirror" of a folder. When you subsequently run the mirror process, only modified files are copied across and the mirror is left identical to the source folder. There are other ways you can set it up (so copying works in both directions if you want, etc.)

http://www.freefilesync.org/

John_Gray

You might be interested in the following calculations of the likely speed of backing up to "The Cloud"!

Assume a steady upload speed of 1 Mbps (easy calculations if your actual speed is less, or, indeed, more).

That gives about 0.125 MB/sec = 7.5 MB/min = 450 MB/hour = 10.8 GB/day.
1 TB will take rather more than 92 days to transmit.

And that's assuming you don't have a data cap...

pappa_golf

hence thre reason for suggesting many post earlier to borrow a desktop and Ethernet cable


been there done it , to USB caddy and by usb cable in nas , wont do it again .

djmsemcgrath

I went with the option of plugging the USB external drive into the Synology NAS box, and using the Synology software to start a backup of selected folders (so I could 3.4TB to one hard drive and the remainder to the other). The speed was around 45Mb/sec which was decent enough. It was doing about 1 TB every 6.5 hours, which I can live with.

I've dismissed the idea of online storage. The vast majority (95%) of the files on my NAS are music, pictures and films/TV shows, so these files won't be getting updated, so I don't really need frequent backups. There are a bit of actual documents that will be getting changes frequently, but I can use Google Drive for these.

I can store the external hard drives at another house so it's hopefully safe enough.

The backups will probably take around 2 full days, but I can get away with only doing that every few months, maybe even twice a year. All I'll lose in the meantime if it fails is a few months worth of downloaded films/TV shows/music, which probably won't be a lot, and will be fairly easy to download again. I wouldn't fancy re-downloading 6TB worth, but over a few months, I'll probably only add to my collection by a few GB, so that's small enough to re-download.

I think I've found the best solution for me, but over the next few years, my collection could easily grow to 10TB+, so backups will become more and more awkward, so I'll have to have a think about a better long term solution.

Perhaps the easiest option would be to go down the route suggested above, of "another NAS just for backup", or maybe I'll upgrade my NAS box (currently 2-bay) to a 4 or 6 bay, and have some hard drives containing all my files, and the other hard drives operating as the backup, in a RAID configuration so the backups are automatic. That could be the quickest way, although it does still leave me open to localised damage such as fire damaging everything. External hard drives will probably still have their place.