Buffalo Forums

   

I currently have a two week old Linkstation Duo Pro, 2Tb system setup as a 1Tb Mirror,

on a WinXP Pro system.

 

I plan on using the NAS / Mirror as my PRIMARY drive.

 

As the Mirror setup is GREAT, makes a SECOND Mirrored copy of my files in MILLISECONDS,

but it also DELETES the Mirrored Backup files in Milliseconds too.

 

Thus I would like to back up my NAS to an External USB Drive every night.

 

Pretty simple procedure and solution.

 

My question is, What USB drive to use, I know there a ton of choices,

but are there any Bells, whistles, features, series, models, ports, speed, etc that I have to consider or

will any generic EXTERNAL USB Hard drive work with this NAS?

   

It doesn't really matter which drive you use.  First of all, the transfer rate from a Linkstation product to the USB drive is not all that fast, so it's not all that important to find a high performance USB drive.  But you should be aware of one common pitfall.  It's important that your backups not have to wait for the drive to spin up again. My freeagent drive was taking a minute or two to spin up after spinning down from inactivity.  Then the backup job would fail. Woops. 

 

The solution was to download software from Seagate that i could use to configure my USB drive to not spin down.  Once I did that, everything was OK.

 

Before I figured out how to configure the Seagate FreeAgent to not spin down I found another work-around that may work for some people who can't configure their USB drive through some other means.  You can set a backup job to occur 10 minutes before your real job.  Set that job to continue and ignore errors.  This is a dummy job; one that doesn't really need to do anything.  But it accesses your USB drive, causing the drive to spin up.  By the time it spins up the first backup job has failed, but now the drive is awake, and the second job can start up ten minutes later.  I seem to remember getting this strategy to work ok until I figured out how to configure the drive properly.

 

As for what brand to use, don't worry about it.  I use one generic enclosure for one of my USB drives, and the other one is a Seagate FreeAgent.  Their performance seems identical.

 

I'm a big believer in USB backups though.

 

Oh, by the way; you mentioned that files can be deleted in an instant. True, but if you turn on the trashbox feature of your LInkStation at least you'll have to clear out the trash before your deletion is permanent.  

   In order to reduce the risk of the computer, NAS and external all being fried in the same disaster, I'd be inclined to look at either some form of online/offsite backup such as Mozy (http://mozy.com/) and/or consider an ioSafe (http://www.iosafe.com/3). They're a bit more expensive than standard externals, but will do more to protect your data.