Backup - Windows PC's to NAS

@Dr_Jon I must agree with @NA9D: if you’re using an array as a backup, don’t run that array in RAID0. You may find your “backup” is completely unusable right when you need it.

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YES! YES! YES! YES! - sorry, couldn’t resist :slight_smile:

I have Stuff to be backed up → RAID5 NAS → Striped NAS or DAS that is usually powered off (and not nearby).

The Striped drive is the 3rd copy of the data and I’m okay that if the first and second copy both disappear the chances of the 3rd one going, when unreachable by Ransomware etc., is vanishingly small…

P.S. Some really important stuff also ends up on a very (veracrypt hidden file) encrypted SSD (and a subset on a metal USB stick on my House keys) from time-to-time. Things like all my notes on accounts, password hints, general firms I deal with including insurance (!!), and assorted documents/files I feel are particularly important to have easily/immediately to hand in case the House burns down, or such-like.

That’s interesting and there are useful points.

However I do have to +1 on the dangers of striped disks. I only did it once, many years ago. A transient failure on the system (everything seemed OK after…) lost the whole RAID. I eventually got everything back from backups etc but it really wasn’t worth all the effort. Since then I have had several Disk/RAID “failures” on my NAS, each one fully recovered by an automatic rebuild.

All I can say is that people warned me about striped arrays and I didn’t listen and I regret it. Lost a lot of valuable and sentimental stuff there.

I have one striped volume on my main NAS now. I only have stuff on there that I’m not worried about losing (such as I have it elsewhere, it’s just “junk”, etc). My long term plan is to gradually phase out those 4 disks as I expand my RAID 5 volume. But I’m not there yet. Still have room on the main RAID 5 volume.

As I mentioned above the Striped NAS/DAS are Backups of Backups and their usual state is powered off. If a disk died I’d replace it and let the RAID5 NAS repeat its Backup…

Whatever works for you, but I’ll say something else. I had a whole bunch of “good” drives that were sitting unused. When I went to use them after my TS-873A purchase last year, just about none of them worked. I don’t think it’s necessarily “good” for hard drives to sit there powered off for long periods of time either…

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Having installed Veeam, I can see that it is an impressive piece of software. But TBH, for our network, it doesn’t really do exactly what we need though it has many many features that could be useful in other use cases.

Now, reading the latest announcement from QNAP on HDP, I should probably re-examine that and see if that changes anything… before defining the backup strategy and migrating from the old NAS

That’s odd - I did the install and the Veeam folder in Program Files is 17.7GB - the Windows install App lists over 3GB of components.

I cannot find Veeam in the Qnap App Manager. Is this Software compatible with Qnap?

Veeam is a 3rd party backup app that works on different platforms and simply uses any standard storage device as a target.

You download and install Veeam free agent on the client (PC/laptop) and configure it to back up to your NAS. No NAS installation is required.