QNAP TS-433 HBS 3 – Setting Up Weekly Full (Sundays) & Daily Incremental Backups

English Backup and data protection
1

Hi everyone,

We are currently running a QNAP TS-433 (4-Bay) NAS in our office for internal file storage and backup. Our drive layout is configured as follows:

  • Bays 1 & 2: 2x 20 TB (RAID 1) $\rightarrow$ Primary company shared storage

  • Bays 3 & 4: 2x 20 TB (RAID 1) $\rightarrow$ On-site backup pool

Currently, we back up the primary storage (Disks 1 & 2) to the backup pool (Disks 3 & 4) every day using HBS 3 (Hybrid Backup Sync). However, we want to optimize our backup strategy to meet the following schedule:

  • Sundays: Complete Full Backup

  • Monday through Saturday: Incremental Backups (changed/new files only)

My plan is to configure this via HBS 3 using Advanced Schedule combined with Smart Versioning (setting Sunday as the anchor for weekly full versions).

Before pushing this into production, I’d appreciate some insight from anyone running a similar setup:

  1. QuDedup Overhead: To prevent full weekly backups from eating up storage unnecessarily on our 20 TB volume, keeping QuDedup enabled seems like the right approach. How does QuDedup perform on the TS-433 in terms of CPU utilization and job completion speed?

  2. Retention & Pruning: If we enforce a retention policy (e.g., keeping 4 weekly Sunday restore points), does HBS 3 handle background version pruning smoothly without corrupting index data?

  3. Are there any specific caveats, performance tweaks, or best practices you would recommend for this type of local backup job in HBS 3?

Thanks in advance for your advice and suggestions!

Would you like to add or modify any specific details before posting?

2

I think you forgot an AI prompt on the bottom of your post.

  1. Forget about dedupe on this home NAS, even on my 1288X dedupe takes forever.
  2. You should backup externally to the NAS , internal.backups won’t help you if the NAS dies (you cannot read those disks in your Win or Mac systems)
3

We prefer this approach for fast access, and we normally back up to an external HDD as well. However, our main concern is this: if something happens to the primary file, will we still be able to access the original files or any updated versions saved in the backups?

4

Sound like you should do snapshots instead of copying files across internal Volumes.

Snapshots on thin volumes only hold delta changes, so there is no need for any costly dedupe actions.

5

Hi,

When HBS uses RTRR to back up to local storage, an external drive, or another NAS, each retained version is a complete, independently restorable point in time. It is not a full + incremental chain where later versions depend on earlier deltas.

Unchanged files are represented through hard links to data already present at the destination. So although each version appears as a complete file tree, unchanged data does not need to be stored again. Deleting an older version therefore only removes that version’s references; it does not affect the integrity or restore capability of the remaining versions.

On the transfer side, HBS is file-level rather than block-level. Only files detected as changed need to be transferred, but if a file has changed, the whole file is transferred again.

Have you also considered Snapshot + Snapshot Replica? Snapshots work at the block level, so only changed blocks need to be retained or replicated, and Snapshot Replica can replicate them to another storage pool either locally or on another QNAP NAS.