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Is This Possible?

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SpeedThree

Regular Contributor
Is this possible/is this a wise idea or not? I'd appreciate any input before I waste a lot of time on a bad idea.

We have two computers in the house: the important one is upstairs and connected to 3 external HDDs: one is used to clone my MacintoshHD using CCC every other day and the other two are in a dual dock being used for Time Machine.

I have another external HD and a Synology RT2600ac router and a computer that is less important to us located on another floor.

Is it possible/wise to try to figure out how to connect this external HD to the USB port of my Synology and clone the Mac located on another floor over WiFi?

The computer we would clone, if possible, is a late 2012 MB Pro running Catalina.
 
Is the 2600 your primary router or are you just proposing to use it as your NAS engine?
 
If you want to increase, stabilize or otherwise supplement your backups and storage, the correct answer is really a proper NAS (or cloud storage). While they may work, at least for now, at some point, hopefully when not faced with a critical issue, you may find that choosing docking bays and / or USB drives run off a router are not as reliable or as stable as you had hoped. *I* would not really on this for anything important or critical, at least not as a single point of backup.

Even doing manual updates to a local usb disk when you feel it worthwhile would, IMHO, be a better option than running a backup to a router crippled with a usb drive.

Can it be done? Yes

Do you want to rely on it? Your choice.

Running scripts, saving logs, sharing a few files is a completely different beast from potentially mission critical backups (although I'm not really a fan of running anything off the usb port myself. I've seen the negative impact on performance and read many issues on hear). Will definitely point out that many do use it and are happy. It's just something that YOU need to weigh the pros and cons of as you are the one who decides if the performance hit is worth it, the potential data loss is manageable, etc
 
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Nothing more I can add that @dosborne just said. Was going to say the same thing. Your primary router is no place for a reliable NAS. I use my Router Samba only for small transient file transfers between machines. Works good for that. For large jobs or huge transfer, sure it is possible, but your network performance is gonna suffer, or your Samba performance is gonna suffer, or both.
 
Thank you very much, both of you. This was clearly not a good idea on my part and best to have been dissuaded from pursuing it at the outset rathe than to have spent hours on something that would have been a waste of time. Appreciate your help.
 
No harm in playing around with it though to see if indeed it works for you. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket and count on it as an only backup mechanism. A fun project to play with, but with some caveats.
 

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