The Backup’s in the Box

If there’s one thing that the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ doesn’t give you, it’s an excuse not to back up. A 5-client license for EMC Retrospect Professional 7.5 for Windows and Desktop for Mac, is included on the Installation CD, allowing you to back up 5 computers on your network to the ReadyNAS. With EMC’s roots in enterprise network computing, Retrospect is certainly more than suited for the job, though power-users will probably find it more to their liking than novice or average users.

While the ReadyNAS NV+ can easily serve as repository for backups performed with Retrospect or your favorite backup program, the Integrated Backup Manager allows the ReadyNAS to backup everything from PCs to websites, FTP servers and other NAS appliances without client-based backup software. You can backup to shares on the ReadyNAS, or to another remote source (including FTP, NFS and Rsync servers, or another NAS, for example).

Backups can be scheduled to run in four hour increments up to every 24 hours between certain hours on a daily or weekly basis. Incremental backups are automatically performed between the full backups you schedule. Jobs can also be run manually, either through FrontView, or by assigning the backup job to the Backup Button. Backup schedules are always offset 5 minutes from the hour to let you schedule snapshots on the hour; that way you can backup the snapshots as well as your data. If your backup destination is running low on space, you can have the Backup Manager delete all the files and folders there, before performing a full backup. The Backup Manager can also change ownership of backup files (useful in Share security mode). Multiple backup jobs can be scheduled, enabled and disabled as needed.

The USB port in at the front of the ReadyNAS NV+ is reserved for two special backup functions. The first function automatically copies the contents of a USB Flash Device on connect, to whatever share you specify in unique, time-stamped folders to avoid overwriting earlier version content. If you ever though what a drag it is to have to turn on your PC just to copy some files off your flash drive down to your NAS, you’ll really love this feature.

The second special function of the front USB port allows you to connect an external USB hard drive to it and have the ReadyNAS recognize it and use it as network storage and you can use the Backup Button to automatically perform a “one-touch backup” of the shares from the ReadyNAS to it (provided you haven’t already configured the button to run another job through the Backup Manger, of course). The following file systems are allowed on external USB Hard Drives:

Note that the Windows NT/2000/XP NTFS file system mounts as read-only. If you want to be able to write to the drive, you’ll have to format it as either FAT32 or Ext3. Ext3 is recommended if you’ll be accessing the drive primarily through ReadyNAS (or Linux)—the main advantage being that file ownership and mode information can be retained—whereas it can’t in FAT32. If you want to access a drive formatted with the Ext3 file system on a Windows PC download and install the free Ext2 Installable File System for Windows.

Snapshots make point-in-time backups of all of your data shares on the ReadyNAS volume. Whether a folder or file on the volume somehow got corrupt, is attacked by a virus, or unintentionally gets overwritten with another version, you can recover it with a last-know-good copy from the snapshot.

All ReadyNAS units ship with, or default to using 5% of the volume’s total size, to store snapshots, which the user can change at any time without affecting their data. Snapshot space can be reduced to 1% of the volume’s size, and increased to 11% of the volume’s size. The length of time required to resize the snapshot space depends on the size of your ReadyNAS volume and the amount of data stored on it. Though the process is not destructive, as a precaution, you are prompted to back up any important data you have on the volume before proceeding. The maximum size for snapshot reserved space regardless of volume size is 100GB.

Snapshots can be scheduled in intervals from once every four hours to once a week (manual snapshots can be taken through FrontView as well). Unlike Microsoft’s Shadow Copy/Previous Version and System Restore, ReadyNAS snapshots do not accumulate like checkpoint files. When a snapshot is taken, it is immediately replaced by the next one taken. ReadyNAS snapshots are treated and named liked the original shares with a –snap appended to the name. A snapshot of a share named Downloads, for example, will be named Downloads-snap. Finances 2007 will be name Finances 2007-snap, and so on.

You can open and browse a snapshot share the same as you can the original. However, the contents are read-only. Although you can copy files and folders from a snapshot, you cannot change or delete files and folders in them; nor can you copy or move files into them. You should avoid permanently mapping snapshots to a drive letter as you would a normal network share.

Keep in mind that file and folder creation, modification and deletions will take up the snapshot reserved space. For example, if you delete a 3MB digital photograph, the change caused by the deletion will use 3 Megs of snapshot space. If your PowerPoint presentation changes from 1MB to 2.5MB, 1.5 Megs of snapshot space will be used. Also, if the reserve space is filled, then the snapshot becomes invalid and can’t be accessed.