Windows 8.1 how to sync or backup a NAS to a local drive

[dugimodo]

I've just purchased a QNAP TS213 and installed two 4TB WD red drives in RAID 0 mode to give me 8TB of network storage. I have it working and have managed to map a couple of network drives on my PC's so they can all use the same space. (It wasn't as simple as it's supposed to be but that's another issue). I also have 4 x 2TB WD green drives I want to use to backup this to on a weekly or monthly basis.

Can someone suggest/explain a simple method I might use to do this? I do have a USB 3.0 enclosure that will fit all 4 drives but I don't entirely trust it (one time a drive suddenly reverted to RAW unformatted while in this enclosure for no reason I could ever discover) and if I connect it directly to the NAS I am not sure how it will deal with 4 external drives on 1 port.

I was thinking I could set up a 4 way software JBOD or RAID0 on a windows 10 PC and set it to sync to the network drives but I can't see any obvious way to do this.

I have 3 main goals:
1. Set up a single location to store all my files so they aren't scattered across my many devices and make it accessible to all of them
2. stream music and videos from this NAS to my devices
3. Find a way to back it up onto my existing drives - not as important as you might think. I've lost the whole collection twice now and life goes on but I'd prefer it didn't happen again

A 4th goal for later is to figure out how to use the NAS for downloading torrents, I can get it to work with the download centre but it's awkward to use and I can't figure out how to use transmission and the remote GUI with it at all.

[SolMiester]

I've just purchased a QNAP TS213 and installed two 4TB WD red drives in RAID 0 mode to give me 8TB of network storage. I have it working and have managed to map a couple of network drives on my PC's so they can all use the same space. (It wasn't as simple as it's supposed to be but that's another issue). I also have 4 x 2TB WD green drives I want to use to backup this to on a weekly or monthly basis.

Can someone suggest/explain a simple method I might use to do this? I do have a USB 3.0 enclosure that will fit all 4 drives but I don't entirely trust it (one time a drive suddenly reverted to RAW unformatted while in this enclosure for no reason I could ever discover) and if I connect it directly to the NAS I am not sure how it will deal with 4 external drives on 1 port.

I was thinking I could set up a 4 way software JBOD or RAID0 on a windows 10 PC and set it to sync to the network drives but I can't see any obvious way to do this.

I have 3 main goals:
1. Set up a single location to store all my files so they aren't scattered across my many devices and make it accessible to all of them
2. stream music and videos from this NAS to my devices
3. Find a way to back it up onto my existing drives - not as important as you might think. I've lost the whole collection twice now and life goes on but I'd prefer it didn't happen again

A 4th goal for later is to figure out how to use the NAS for downloading torrents, I can get it to work with the download centre but it's awkward to use and I can't figure out how to use transmission and the remote GUI with it at all.

Hi, first thing I would do is change your raid array to 1 = mirror, as at present you have twice as much chance of a volume loss with a stripped array with no tolerance.
As for the USB enclose and other drive, you will need to give more info.
Shame you didnt just get a bigger QNAP for fit the other drives

[dugimodo]

Thanks but I don't want a mirror (costs twice as much for the same storage), the stripe was on purpose and is the reason I want a backup. It was a conscious choice and I'm aware of the risk but I wanted 8TB of space and can't afford to buy a 4 bay NAS and 4 of these drives. Neither did I want to put the old drives into the NAS as they are not suitable for that type of operation. (plus a 6+ bay NAS is much more expensive and I spent enough already). I figure the old drives should be ok for a backup and will take my chances on the possibilty of 2 drives failing at once.

My reasoning is this;
I already had 8TB of storage space in the form of 4 x 2TB green drives but had no way to back them up.
By buying the same capacity in a NAS I can keep 2 copies of everything but I want to automate that process somehow.
If a drive fails I replace it and restore everything from the backup, no mirror needed.
WD green drives are not recommended for NAS use, in fact it's fairly strongly suggested you don't use them that way (I know many people have done it anyway).

The external Enclosure is a Vantec HX4 USB 3.0 4 bay enclosure, it shows up as 4 separate drives when connected to windows. Don't worry about that too much though, my preference is to install all 4 drives in a windows PC and somehow schedule it to sync to the 2 mapped network drives on a regular basis so I can just turn the PC on every so often and let it sync the whole NAS. I guess I could just fill the enclosure and connect it to the NAS and see what happens, they are currently empty anyway. I just have trouble trusting the HX4 after it lost a drives worth of data randomly once before. I assume QNAP has a backup tool of some kind if I connect the the enclosure.

[SolMiester]

HI, you are correct WD green are not for RAID, nor other they suitable for NAS drives. Which means you will have 4 x separate volumes to backup too. I dont know how Windows sees the Vantec unit, so cant really advise.
I would suggest a robocopy script maybe attached to a scheduled task, or perhaps sync software, but then you will need to work out capacity issue to each drive.

[wainuitech]

Adding to above:

2. Its in the manual how to Stream from the NAS.
3. What SolMiester advised relating to Robocopy, its a often unknown backup installed already in Windows. If you are not to happy with scripts, then you can use a GUI designed for RoboCopy, makes it idiot Proof ( almost) add-a-graphical-user-interface-gui-to-the-microsoft-robocopy-command-line-tool/ The first program works really well.

With a GUI like above, you can set different "scripts" to run automatically at different times to different locations.

3a. Again its mentioned in the manual how to backup to external drives.

As for Green Drives -- They do have a history of not being very good.

Personally never used the Brand of NAS, but browsing the manual it doesn't look that awkward to setup, mind you, reading and doing can be different things .

[dugimodo]

Thanks guys, following Solmeisters tips I had a play with robocopy and created a .bat file to mirror the music directory and then scheduled it to run nightly, that all works and I can expand on it as needed. Robomirror does look like it makes it all a lot easier. Unfortunately it turns out the external enclosure does not allow any kind of volume spanning so if I want to use it for backups I have to keep everything in 2TB chunks and split it across drives, not actually Ideal.

Manual? there's an Idea. Downloading it now as it didn't seem to come with one. Will have a read and see if it solves my issues.
Setting it up was fairly easy, it's using it afterwards that's proving less than obvious but I'm getting there.

Might scrap the whole Idea yet and set it up as a 4TB mirror and buy more storage later. Having issues deciding what to do. I have more drives than mentioned already so really don't think I need more, I am trying to consolidate things.

[wainuitech]

Manual? there's an Idea. Downloading it now as it didn't seem to come with one.

you do know its the last resort eh

I have more drives than mentioned already so really don't think I need more, I am trying to consolidate things.

SNAP!! got several Servers, Self made NAS. Have stuff on various locations, mainly so if one fails wont lose the lot.

[dugimodo]

Ok so using robomirror to backup the entire NAS to an 8TB stripe of the 4 WD green drives is proving to be incredibly slow, for some reason it's taking days and there's only 1TB of data to backup. In contrast a straight windows copy got all that data onto the NAS in a few hours and it's slower in that direction. Also 4 drives configured that way makes even me nervous and I'm not a paranoid person at all. I'm rethinking my strategy a bit, might abandon all my WD green drives for the moment.

The time to sort this out is now before the data gets too unwieldy.

What do you guys think of this as a plan;
1. Buy a second 4TB SG barracuda to match the one in my gaming PC and create a 4TB mirror in the PC.
2. Empty out the NAS and reconfigure as a 4TB mirror (By basically archiving it's contents now to the new mirror and leaving them there )
3. Use the NAS for music and any new multimedia content.
4. Use the PC for a second copy of the music, an archive of older multimedia I'm less likely to access over the network and also general storage on the PC
5. create a folder mirrored across both PC & NAS with a scheduled robocopy for anything I want to really protect
6. figure out what to do with 5 x 2TB drives I'll no longer have a need for (4 already mentioned plus 1 currently in gaming PC)

[wainuitech]

What ever you decide, always remember that the first copy/backup is always going to take the longest. Using something like Robomirror and setting to a schedule the alterations will take a fraction of the time as it only copies/backups changes.

Personally I have copies and data on different computers, that way if any one of them fails you wont lose everything. The NAS is actually an old Acer Mini computer with NAS Software in it. It streams movies, music fine over the LAN. The WHS has quite a few documents, data and other stuff, and thats backed up manually monthly ( if I remember) to a external HDD that I plug in at the time. The only thing that gets changed daily are the automatic Backups of the computers.

Problem with having mirrored drives on the one PC (acting as backups) is if anything happens to one it will mirror to the other. Also if the Computer goes bang due to a power fault, you run the risk of losing both drives.

[1101]

Be carefull using /mir , or some mirror command.
"so if files are present on the destination but removed from the source they will get removed from the destination"
ie you accidently del a file, the /mir will del it from backup (?).

I use this , sometimes I leave the /log out if no one is going to be checking its log.
robocopy c:\ u:\backup /b /e /R:0 /W:0 /xj /A-:RASHNT /LOG+:u:\logs\backup.txt /XD