Backup NAS to NAS

[JohnConnolly]

I'm loking for a good way to do reciprocal backups between two NAS's i.e NAS-1 backup on NAS-2, NAS-2 on NAS-1. They are located in different buildings each with a wired LAN but interconnected via a private microwave link so building to building communication is pretty slow. Each NAS will have around 750GB of data to backup.

I have tested ntbackup in incremental mode but as the backup file has to be read across the link, appended and sent back, it's very slow. I've tried creating a different backup file for each daily run but then the restore is a real mess having to browse each backup to find a file.

What I need is an incremental or differential backup, creating a new backup file on each run but all integrated into a single database for restore operations.

Any suggestions?

 

[clonny2]

Depends on the NAS. If it is something like a GuardianOS SnapServer you can use SnapEDR to replicate. Otherwise, you should be able to use BackupExec either with a mapped drive to each NAS or install the client agent.

Or, you can use rsync with your own scripts, or bat files to do this.

 

[LWComputingMVP]

It's not clear if the data is the same on both NAS units, but if you're just trying to keep a sync'd backup, I'd suggest scripts - robocopy/xxcopy or if the NAS support it, rsync.

 

[JohnConnolly]

These NAS's are just dumb black boxes full of disks. You can set their ip's, names, shares, users and passwords and that's pretty well it. No way to program or modify them and they don't support rsync or anything else.

Sorry I wasn't clear about the data. Each NAS holds the active data for it's local users, say half it's capacity. The other half would hold an incremental backup for the other NAS so we can roll back to previous versions of files. As the NAS's are in different buildings this would also give us disaster backup.

 

[LWComputingMVP]

Then script it using Robocopy or XXCOPY.

 

[JohnConnolly]

Thanks for the suggestions. XXCOPY seems rather slow - I haven't tried Robocopy yet. The best I've tried is rsync but I can't get it to work when both the source and destination are remote. Here's the incantation:

rsync -vr \\192.168.100.120\production \\192.168.2.153\backup\test

All it does is create an empty folder "test" in the destination \backup.

 

[JohnConnolly]

Problem solved - rsync now working with:

rsync -vr //192.168.100.120/production
//192.168.2.153/backup/test

 

[JohnConnolly]

OK, now I've got rsync working I want to make the whole thing a lot smarter. As I said, the NAS's are dumb so what I'm doing is NAS1 -> Win2003 Server -> NAS2. This means I can't take advantage of the rsync "just send the part of the file that's changed". But, both locations have Win2003 servers so the next step is:

NAS1 -> Win20032 -> NAS2
and
NAS2 -> Win20031 -> NAS1

so minimum traffic over the slow microwave link for changed files.

As step 3, I would like to add a roll-back possibility (with milti-generation files within the existing folder structure), but still keepng the microwave traffic as low as possible.

Any comments, thoughts or scripts much appreciated.