Thoughts on using Terastation devices as offline backup units.

[Kane88]

Before this discussion goes into the idea that RAID is not a backup, which I am well aware of:
(And knowing at one time even Seagate themselves sold a backup plus fast! product that was configured with two disks as RAID 0 out of the box... go figure, right? true story.)

The idea being considered is to maybe start using an older Terastation as an offline backup of an active online Buffalo NAS.  The data isn't anything mission critical, it is very infrequently accessed data that is in the process of being taken offline.  Yet it is data that sill should be backed up on occasion.

That said, are any of you out there are using any Buffalo NAS unit itself (not external drives connected to them) for online or offline backups?

And how reliable have they been for you?

[As3nd0r]

Yes, for years. No major issues apart from an occasional hdd failing in the older units. For my own use I have a old TS-XL offsite that is set on a timer and backup target for a local TS (which itself is replication target of the actual TS that is in use.). "old" data goes to the XL (in addition to some current data I prefer to safeguard a bit more). XL has a USB HDD attached as well just in case.

Typically, if older units need to be retired I tend to reuse them as backup units for less critical data or offline data. most protocols are switched off on those, i. e. No smb etc. So they are only there for receiving backups for the unlikely case of multiple failures further up the chain and also store mostly data that is not typically needed on a day to day basis. Again, the old data would be on at least 2 units.

[Kane88]

Your case sounds interesting, I'm looking at a similar situation.  The size of the disk sets I would use for the two units- would be the same.  With the data going from a newer unit to an older one.  It sounds like using an older TS-XEL as a target would work, in the same way that you're doing.

I have yet to read up on how backup and replication work with these units.  Was it hard to configure?

If you have all the protocols off on the TS-XL backup unit, how does the data get moved to it?  It's just part of the replication process?  And then how do access the data- once it is there?

[1000001101000]

If it helps I do basically the same thing from my main system to a couple if Intel Terastations. I use rsync over samba to keep them in sync.