What's new

NAS Backup Strategy Questions (Asustor AS6606T) --long post!

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

t2000kw

New Around Here
I’ll number my questions to make it easy for anyone to respond to just one or two parts of this post.

I have some questions about a backup and restore plan with my Asustor 6606T NAS. I have been using Easus Todo Backup Home (paid version--we'll call it Backup Home from here on). It allows making full system backups, partition backups, and also incremental backups. The paid version, which I have a lifetime license to, also allows you to restore from both full and incremental backups. The free version will allow incremental backups, but you have to buy the paid version to restore those. The paid version is what I have and would like to use, but I am open to other suggestions for free or paid software. Keep in mind I have 3 laptops, possibly another if I repair it from liquid damage, probably mostly keyboard replacement, but I don’t want to go broke buying multiple licenses to cover them all. I can handle buying two more licenses for what I use now (or 3 more). I AM OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS FOR ALTERNATIVES TO SOFTWARE as long as I can do incremental and full system image backups and restores, or can do some combination of one full system backup and file backups.

I have used the Win PE CDROM I made from within Backup Home to boot in the CD tray and run system image backups to an external 1 TB drive up until this time. Now that I have a NAS, I’d like to do most or all of it over wifi. I can probably just use the bootable CDROM, even in the laptop without a built-in optical drive using a USB external optical drive. I am open to doing the full system backup images over an Ethernet cable or USB cable.

First set of questions:

1. Is it practical to do a full system image backup over wifi?
2. Can I do the same with an Ethernet cable with this NAS?
3. Can I do the initial full system image backup through the USB port on the NAS? (If so, how to do it?)

Next is backing up Android devices and my Chromebook:

4. What software can be used for Android backups to my “personal cloud” NAS?

As for alternative software for my Windows backups:

5. What other software might be worth looking at for backups? I see Aomei backup as a free alternative but don’t know if it does incremental backups and ALSO incremental restores after the initial full backup. I am not opposed to buying multiple licenses if the total for all 3 or 4 laptops doesn’t cost me much over $100, and I prefer lifetime licenses over single version licenses and definitely don’t care for subscription-based software.

I also have a Linux laptop:

6. What software do you recommend for the Linux laptop? I could use the bootable Windows PE Backup Home disc and just select all partitions to make a full system image backup once in a while but I don’t know if Backup Home will work under Crossover (which I get for free as a beta tester but essentially, it’s an enhanced version of WINE ).

I need whatever solution I end up using to be simple enough for my wife to use and she is not a computer geek.

Thanks for reading this, and also for your responses if you’re able to offer suggestions. I have read through the manual but some of it didn’t sink in, so please don’t just reply with “read the factory manual” as a response, but citing a page number in the manual could actually be helpful.

 
I'm not familiar with the specifics of that brand, but can offer some general advice.

Check to see what apps or software comes with the nas for backing up on windows.

See if the software you have will save to a network share.

The usb port in the nas likely won't help you in your scenario.

A full system backup is likely to take forever and not be useful via WiFi, but ethernet should be fine particularly for incremental.

Consider a free tool like rsync to backup your data on your win/linux systems. Do you really need to backup the operating system portion.

My personal strategy is to ruse rsync to copy all the data folders to and from my laptops, pcs, etc then replicate that, again with rsync, across 3x nas units and use a nas app to sync with my google drive cloud service
 
Last edited:
I thought I might be able to reply by email, but apparently you can't do that here. I pasted my returned email below, so the quote marks will be different from the usual ones used in this forum.


See below for my comments, and thanks for the things to consider.

On Wed, 17 Mar 2021 03:11:51 +0000, SmallNetBuilder Forums
<dosborne> wrote:

>I'm not familiar with the specifics of that brand, but can offer some general advice.
>

My guess is that most NAS devices work similarly, so any advice is
appreciated.

>Check to see what apps or software comes with the nas for backing up on windows.

It actually has some but it's geared for file backups and synching as
those files change, get deleted, or added to. Not a complete backup
except I could check everything and I'd have all files backed up, just
no way to restore them in one operation to give me a working operating
system with everything the way it was before. I am going to continue
looking, though, as there is some 3rd party software written for this
NAS and probably generic software elsewhere that might target my
specific desires/needs.

>
>See if the software you have will save to a network share.

It will do that, as anything on my PC will see the mapped drives to
various folders on the NAS if I want to save to it or retrieve a file
from there. I just am not sure how it will work when I connect an
Ethernet cable to the unused port on the back of my router. I'll be
experimenting with that shortly, and also with a USB cable to see if
that's an option with this NAS. I think one of the reasons they put 3
USB ports on this was to allow adding an external drive (I have two I
can add) for additional storage but it won't be safeguarded by the
RAID drive system, and also maybe to allow backing up by USB, but I
will be testing that out this week also with the Ethernet cable. I
figure once I get a full image backup I can do incrementals over wifi
since there won't be much data to back up since only the files that
changed get backed up and probably some information is also stored to
indicate what got deleted, too. Not sure on that last point but after
you do a full restore then all of your incrementals restored, you
should end up with whatever you had at your last incremental backup.

>
>The usb port in the nas likely won't help you in your scenario.

I'll be trying that but I won't get my hopes up. :)

>
>A full system backup is likely to take forever and not be useful via WiFi, but ethernet should be fine particularly for incremental.

My brother, who helped me find what I did wrong on my 2nd laptop when
I couldn't map folders to virtual drives in Windows Explorer on it,
said the Ethernet would probably be the easiest and fastest.

>
>Consider a free tool like rsync to backup your data on your win/linux systems. Do you really need to backup the operating system portion.

I will look into that. I don't think with Linux I'll need to back up
the OS itself but if I do, it would be a one-step restore instead of
starting a new install then restoring data.

As for the Windows OS's on the 3 laptops, I believe I do want to do
the complete backup of the system, which would include the operating
system, boot partition, etc., so that getting things back the way they
were would be a one-step operation. That way I wouldn't lose any
product licenses. Some of my software is from special giveaways where
you have to activate the software before the end of the day, and
reinstalling at a later time won't work. I's also lose my Malwarebytes
lifetime license, and some other licenses to other software. Sure, I
could contact many of them to get an other activation added to their
activation server but that's not possible in all cases, so restoring
it to the way it was at the last backup is what I want. The Linux PC
is not used a lot and I can compromise on that one. Any data I have on
it can be lost without much of a fuss here.

Thanks for your ideas and I'll try the Ethernet cable for a full
backup and see what happens.

Don
 
Keep in mind that a NAS is network storage. It is not intended to function like a drive attached directly to your pc.

Along those lines you seem a bit confused as to how it functions. Connecting via WiFi or (wired) ethernet is exactly the same, except for the speed of the connection. In most cases, wired is faster, but it does depend on your setup.

The usb ports in a nas are not for connecting to pcs, but, as you stated, but are for additional storage, in some cases you actually can still make it part of your raid array. In some cases, there may be a built in backup ability, sometimes requiring the push of a button on the nas, designed to automatically backup the device (usb stick for example). They can also be used, in some cases, for UPS monitoring (auto shutdown if there is a power failure).

If you really want a full image backup of your pc (rarely used these days), then hopefully your software can write directly to the nas (using samba of unc), but you can also write the backup "image" to a local drive, then archive the image to your nas for long term storage. I typically do that using the windows built in backup and system disk creation apps when I setup a new pc.

The main issue with full image backups is that incremental information must also be managed. It is typically easier to separate "operating system" and "data" as it is extremely easy to sync data backups and incremental copies these days. Something as simple as Google Drive handles it very efficiently as a background task, and us free, for limited storage.

Another option, as you also talk about backing your nas, which is completely different from backing up your pcs, is to use an external usb drive connected to the nas (faster than over the network) if your nas supports it.

The point is I guess that you have MANY options, and only you can decide what works best and is manageable.
 

Similar threads

Latest threads

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top