Best way to backup a backup NAS

October 25, 2007 2:16 AM

I have a small network of 3 computers at home which connect wireless to a router. Plugged into this router is a Netgear sc101 NAS type device. What I’m looking for is another device that will back up the contents of the sc101 so it can be taken off site. I don’t want to have to do a full backup each time just backup files that have changed or are new is this possible? if so could someone recommend a solution ?
posted by toocan to computers & internet (4 comments total)

What I'd do is to set up another NSA with rsync.

Oh, but I see that your NAS doesn't have the HDDs built-in. So, I change my recommendation to: make sure that your off-set backup drive is plugged into it at specified times (friday nights, sunday afternoons?), and then just setup a cron job to rsync your data on the primary drive to the off-site drive.
posted by philomathoholic at 2:46 AM on October 25, 2007

A simple approach is to buy a USB drive that's as large as the capacity of your NAS101. Then periodically copy the SC101 onto it. That's liable to take a while, since USB drives aren't the fastest things in the world, do the bulk copy overnight. Then you can unplug the USB drive in the morning and take it offsite. You might find that trying to do an incremental backup isn't worth the hassle.

If you're really paranoid, buy two USB drives and do a rotating backup.
posted by dws at 6:38 AM on October 25, 2007

In theory, incremental backup is really easy, though I don't do it.

Even Winrar (other zip utilities too, I expect) has the ability to archive only files with the archive bit set, then clear the bit. The archive bit is an ancient characteristic of Windows/DOS, and gets set appropriately by any write/move/rename of the file. That's all you need for perfect incremental backups.. Though, like I said, I don't do it (mostly because I use CD/DVD as backup medium, and it is always a good idea to have extra copies of all data, because they age so poorly - but since I have no track record with the feature, it does make me a little nervous).
posted by Chuckles at 6:57 AM on October 25, 2007

Software is your friend.

cwRsync
Microsoft Synctoy
posted by tracert at 11:53 AM on October 25, 2007