Trying to setup NAS....

[Logicarn]

Hello Everyone,

Let me give you a run down of my situation here.

I decided to be the smart guy and try my first what I like to think IT Project. I advised my brother in law who has a small business and home computers I would buy a Linksys NAS w/ 2 bays and then put a 1TB WD drive in it and set up his backups! How hard can that be right?

2 days later I am ripping my hair out and losing sleep over this nonsense! Here is the deal...everyone knows that backups should be offsite right? So I sad ok...I'll keep your NAS at my place...roughly 300KM's away from his business site. So I get home take apart this new toy for me to play with and I got it FLAWLESSLY working within my network.

When I try many different alternatives to getting the backups to a FTP server that I have the NAS setup as I get connection issues (Linksys software...forget name now, Norton Ghost 14, Acronis v12). Hell, I even used NetDrive to try and map a FTP server as a network drive to try and backup to that...all are coming up with connection problems or really generic errors. Netdrive kept crashing and I just scrapped that

I can get more specific errors later....just going to bed now hoping someone will give me some insight if maybe its just a bandwidth issue with my ISP, or is it a FTP access issue? (even though I can access that drive and create a folder in the drive it cannot connect too)

Please anyone?

 

[itsp1965]

So let's get this straight (and forgive me if I didn't read it right) are you attempting to run a backup that could be in the 100s of GBs that is 300KM away over an ISP link? Yeah I think you have a bandwidth issue

Offsite backups technically do not refer to backups being done in a far away distance. Usually you would make a copy of the data to tape or disk locally and then take it offsite. Why don't you set up the NAS locally at your in-laws business site and setup a secondary drive like a USB drive to which they can backup their data and take that home with them?

 

[Logicarn]

Yeah thats what I was thinking...I might try to get a VPN up and see if that does anything.

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

what will a vpn help here ? Only thing that helps here are wan accelerators like steelheads from riverbed. And even then, the bandwidth and latency determine your performance.
And then we are not talking about small business anymore, but enterprise level

NetApp Certified NCDA/NCIE-SAN

 

[LeeMason]

There are a number of issues here. Bandwidth will be an issue if you are just doing FTP backups. You have 1TB drives but how much data do you want to backup? Bandwidth alone will not stop the configuration working but you might find that you need to open up more ports on your firewall to point to the remote NAS device (I assume that you have opened port 25 for FTP on your firewall).

If you are intent on doing this I would suggest:

1. A NAS device on each site
2. Backup locally to the local NAS
3. Use replication of some sort from the local NAS to the remote NAS as a background trickle feed

Some NAS devices (such as those produced by Thecus) support Rsync/Nsync to replicate data from one NAS device to another.



Lee Mason
Optimal Projects Ltd

http://www.opl.co.uk

http://www.backupsanywhere.com