So I want to take my secondary, backup NAS and re-do it so I can add an SSD based first storage group.
All that is on this NAS is HBS backup data from my primary NAS, Time Machine Backup data from my Macs and a couple of virtual machines.
The TimeMachine data gets snapshot replicated back to my first NAS on a nightly basis.
I need to “backup” the backup data and the VMs. That’s it. The VMs are small - no big deal.
Can I snapshot the backup data and replicate it back to the first NAS and then recover everything from the snapshots? That’s what they are for right?
I tried backing things up with HBS but was getting a massively large backup size that didn’t make sense (see my other thread) and anyhow that backup has “failed.”
So rather than trying to do the backups to my USB drive again, can I just snapshot things and recover from the snapshot after I get the NAS set back up again? Or should I really do the backup?
Technically I lose nothing other than some backup history if I just flat out wiped out this NAS. I do TimeMachine backups to my primary NAS as well and the VMs also exist there. But I’d like to keep my backup and TimeMachine history.
That article does a great job explaining how to set up the snapshot replication job and how to clone it from the vault. What it does NOT do is explain how to restore the data back to the original NAS. The clone just clones the data in the snapshot to the local NAS - it does not transfer it back to the original NAS.
Snapshots are basically like taking an image of the data as it exists at a certain point in time. The snapshot itself is tied to a dataset — on QTS that means the whole volume, but on QuTS hero it can be just a single folder.
So, after you hit the [Revert] button (like I mentioned before), if what you want is just to make another copy of the files instead of rolling everything back, that’s when you’d use the [Clone] button in the bottom right.
And if you’re trying to restore the snapshot back onto the original NAS, then you’d actually want the [Restore to] option.
By the way, if you’re doing a full restore, you need to select the entire dataset that was included when the snapshot was created. But if you only want to pull back certain files, you can drill down into the snapshot and check just the ones you need.
But “Restore To” does not restore it to the exact spot you came from. You have to choose a shared folder on the original NAS and then restore. Then once restored, you have to move the folders back to their original location.
Yeah, basically you can restore straight back to most of the original locations — except for system and /.
So if it’s data under /(root) that you want to put back in the original location, you’ll actually need to go one level deeper and then just select all…
Sorry to hear your setup ran into that stuck issue. just open a support ticket or reach out to Steve — our tech support team will help you check it out.
