NAS Drive Back-up

Take a look at the Synology NAS units. they offer what you're looking for.

If your concerns are theft related, then put your mind at ease and go to the cloud. Any thief willing to break in and walk out with an iMac will likely check other rooms as well. Locking the drive up so you can forget about it does not communicate a practical backup plan to me.

I back up my Macs to a ReadyNAS on-site in case I need quick restore of a file or to reload a machine. But that's not adequate, as if the house burnt down or if someone stole the mac and NAS, I'd be a bit sore with the files gone too. The ReadyNAS also backs up to CrashPlan cloud. It's awesome. The files are all safely stored online as well as on a backup disk. This covers the "three copies" rule, and the "RAID is not backup" rule that everyone always complains about. You'll get that a lot asking these questions on a forum

You can definitely make it work. Just do your research. My ~9tb backup set is enormous. CrashPlan is the only service that allows me to efficiently (cost-wise) back up without killing my wallet. A TimeCapsule would be better than nothing. You can wirelessly backup to it. Or any network share, honestly, there are instructions on how to make them compatible with TimeMachine. NFS / SMB / AFP. They'll all work. You could even share a disk on another machine and back up to that.

mrwizardno2 said:

The ReadyNAS also backs up to CrashPlan cloud. It's awesome.

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Now this has potential for me!

How do you get your readynas to backup to crashplan? Do you run their software on your Mac and get it to backup the share or is there another way?

mrwizardno2 said:

I back up my Macs to a ReadyNAS on-site in case I need quick restore of a file or to reload a machine. But that's not adequate, as if the house burnt down or if someone stole the mac and NAS, I'd be a bit sore with the files gone too. The ReadyNAS also backs up to CrashPlan cloud. It's awesome. The files are all safely stored online as well as on a backup disk. This covers the "three copies" rule, and the "RAID is not backup" rule that everyone always complains about. You'll get that a lot asking these questions on a forum

You can definitely make it work. Just do your research. My ~9tb backup set is enormous. CrashPlan is the only service that allows me to efficiently (cost-wise) back up without killing my wallet. A TimeCapsule would be better than nothing. You can wirelessly backup to it. Or any network share, honestly, there are instructions on how to make them compatible with TimeMachine. NFS / SMB / AFP. They'll all work. You could even share a disk on another machine and back up to that.

Click to expand...

Wow, this must be a first that someone is satisfied with crash plan that has a large amount (more than 1TB) of data. It pretty much sucked for me and many others. In particular it would choke on large files, then crash an burn. Otherwise just slow (some have run weeks - months to backup). And then there is no way to remove the app and vestiges of it short of a OS reinstall. If you have 100 GB or so then it works OK... but that varies from one place to another. And its not really suitable for OS/boot drive backup.

Those with some tech ability can make unapproved NAS devices work with time machine. But most of the time they fail miserably and you won't know it until you try to recover from the corrupted backup files. The web is full of horror stories. If one goes with a NAS product, use something like CCC instead of TM to backup your files.

If one wants to use TimeMachine so you have full use of recovery tools, then stick with an Apple approved product. Instead of locking away a Time Capsule, think about rotating disks, keeping one well hidden, in another building, or safe deposit box and one connected live. This is easy to set up with Time Machine, whether you use a Time Capsule or local drive.

I didn't say there were things I didn't like about my setup! And I overstated my backup size - I thought it was 9. It's 8.2TB.

The CrashPlan binaries on Linux are a memory and CPU hog. They're Java based and use nearly 3GB of RAM to maintain the index for backup, as well as one of the NAS processor cores at nearly 75% cpu at all times. It took some jiggling to get it working (modifying startup commands to allow it to use more RAM), but since then it has worked with zero problems. I get emails weekly from Central showing the backup progress. The initial backup sucked. Maintaining since then hasn't been too bad. I usually sync somewhere around 20 gigs weekly, depending on file changes, from the local client up to Central. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

But ColdCase hit the nail on the head. You need to test your backup strategy. I've reloaded my MacBook Pro several times from the local backup on the NAS. It has worked without problem. I haven't reloaded it from a restore from CrashPlan, but I'm kind of hoping losing the NAS doesn't happen at the same time as needing a restore on any of the Macs.