My old TS-251 RAID 1 is dying. I never used it for anything except file storage.
Bought a new TS-264. Two new HDDs are installed and configured also as RAID 1. Step one: copy all the files from the 251 onto the 264. Suggestions?
I’ve read a lot of advice, but most of it focuses on permanent setups with two NAS devices, which I’m not doing since the old 251 is going out of service after the transfer. Or trying to install the old disks into the new NAS (nope not compatible).
Can I use the USB C ports on the front of each to automagically connect the two storage systems? Do I need to use HybridMount? Or set up both as simple networked file shares, connect to both from a PC, and copy from one to the other? Or really brute force: copy parts of the source 251 onto a PC, then copy those files over to the 264?
Easiest and safest - setup shares and both, copy the files. If something goes wrong, you still have the originals (and I hope you have backups elsewhere of anything important in any case). This is not the most efficient though, as it use your PC to copy, so double the transfer.
Also a good option, setup HBS3 to copy the files. This is direct NAS to NAS.
I would use Hybrid Mount and copy the files from one to the other. Set up NFS sharing on the folders you want to copy (I think NFS is faster than Samba but you have to specifically set it up). Then you can mount the old NAS folders on the new NAS and copy away.
As @dosborne suggests, HBS is also a good way to do it. Effectively, you would “back-up” the entire contents of the old NAS to the new NAS. This though would require some work to the move the folders out of the “backup” directory and put them in all their correct places as HBS has a specific folder tree it uses when backing up.
If you’re using RAID 1, you could move both of your disks to the new device and follow the steps of “replacing disks one-by-one” to replace the disks with the new ones. It may be risky so you’d better have backups before that, but you’ll keep all bytes of your current files as-is after the RAID rebuild.
If you’d like to copy, USB will not work because it needs one side to be “host” and the other side to be “client” but QNAP servers will only act as host. You could connect both devices to your home network and use HBS to sync using “remote NAS” or “remote rsync” as sync source.
Even it’s a one-time job, syncing is better than copying because it could continue easily if interrupted.
HBS3 (Hybrid Backup Sync version 3) have a sync mode (hinted in the app name) that will do an exact synchronization from source folder to destination folder. The Backup mode is for backups and that’s the reason it work differently.