In my 6 TB Qnap NAS, I have well in excess of 1 TB used but less that 1 TB that I need to backup. Using HBS 3, I have a USB backup job configured that I use to routinely back up onto rotating 1 TB external disks. This backup job configuation was easily defined, but needs to be started under Qnap admin control.
I have been looking for a way to selectively define source backup folders for the Qnap’s One Touch USB Backup button and have not come up with a way to do this. Thanks for any guidance, please.
The only way I found to get the HBS3 One Touch USB Copy configuration coding to prompt for multiple source folders to backup is by navigation to each single source folder at a time, and matching with its pre-created folder hierarchy equivalent on the external destination disk. The process of creating and navigating to these pairs of matched source and destination folders is tedious and subject to mistakes. AND GUESS WHAT, only 9 pairs of source and destination folders can be entered.
Wouldn’t it be better to have the One Touch USB button simply linked to an existing USB backup job? Other postings have mentioned a work-around using symbolic links links to source or destination folders, but I do not see where this approach is clearly explained.
Further progress update: One Touch USB Copy Button configuration
In order to configure the QTS service for the One Touch USB Copy Button so it would selectively backup only the necessary 14 source folders on my TS-251+ NAS, I did the following:
Reformatted one of the 1TB external usb destination disks rotated for NAS backup
Re-labeled the external disk generically (QBAK versus QBAK1, 2,3 etc)
Tediously created a folder hierarchy on the destination disk to match the 14 source folders on the NAS
And indeed, when the usb destination disk was connected to the NAS, the One Touch USB Copy Button allowed even more tedious pairing of NAS source and usb destination folders, but only allowed a maximum of 9 source and destination folder pairs. I have 14 folders needing backup.
Can anyone suggest an improved method of One Touch USB Copy Button configuration?
What I would like to have is a simple usb button backup routine that will enable usb backup from NAS to connected USB device when cable connected and One Touch Button pushed. Ideally, clearing or overwriting the destination folders before copying. Or even more ideally without reformatting, using an rsync protocol to retain destination files that have not changed, and only copying or deleting destination files that have changed or are no longer present on the source NAS. Currently, my ~1.5 TB backups take 2-3 hours and my guess is that rsync would be much faster since most of the source files are unchanged.
This is an interesting way that this works. I wonder why you can’t link an existing backup job to the one-button copy service.
I have never used it but I just took a look and agree with you that it seems quite limiting.
What happens if you do a USB backup job and manually backup all your folders? That way all your hierarchy would have been created for you. Then try the one-button bit.
It does seem odd that they only allow 9 folders.
What happens if you pair every backup folder on the NAS with the root folder of the external USB drive?
OK here’s an idea…
1.) Create a normal backup job of whatever folders you want to backup and back all those up to a folder called “USB Backups” on the NAS.
2.) Set this job to run daily or however often you want to backup.
3.) Create a one-button copy job that pairs this “USB Backups” folder with a folder on the external USB drive.
4.) Create the copy to the USB drive whenever you want.
Now, you only have one folder to backup. All your hierarchy and versions are already there in that folder.
I think the USB one-touch is more designed as a “copy” function than a true “backup.”
Thanks for the ideas, NA9D. I’ll try them out and report back. Meanwhile…
What happens if you do a USB backup job and manually backup all your folders?
This works fine, but my rotation of 3 usb portable disks are all 1TB capacity and there is ~1.5 TB of data on the NAS. To get around this source/destination imbalance I had to scrutinize my data and only backup what is necessary. My analysis concluded that about 750 GB of NAS files reflect dated Acronis full and incremental backups which can go back years. I decided that the full current Acronis backup set (1 full and 5 incremental), and the previous backup set are all I really need for the portable usb disks. With this limitation, my rotating usb backup size to the portable disks is about 850 GB, well within their 1 TB capacity.
What happens if you pair every backup folder on the NAS with the root folder of the external USB drive?
I tried to do this, but as I recall, the One Touch USB Configuration had problems selecting a root folder when there were no folders defined on the destination side. I’ll try this idea again and report back.
I’m pretty sure your suggestion about backing up selected folders to a separate folder on the NAS will work, but I think it will be time consuming since the 6 TB NAS disks are mirrored.
I would also like to play around with the synchronize One Touch option, since hopefully that might work like rsync and only update changed files between NAS and USB content. Should be considerably faster.
Backing up 6T is not going to take that long, particularly if you do it incrementally (use version control). The first one will take a while, but after that, it will go pretty quickly. Easily run overnight. When I have my second NAS running (it’s out for repair), I back up 4 TB every night in a couple hours.
No idea if it would work, but what if you create a folder that is setup to be backed up with one touch, then create symbolic links in that folder to all the other folders you want to include?
Hi everyone, thank you all for your valuable suggestions!
I will pass all the issues and recommendations mentioned here to our internal team for further analysis and evaluation. We appreciate your active feedback in helping us improve. Thanks!
My suggestion for an simple fix would be for the HBS3 USB One Touch Configuration page (under “Services” heading) to present a drop-down list of HBS3 existing backup jobs (under “Jobs” heading), and allow selection an already-defined job to be executed upon short press of the USB One Touch Button.