I agree, hot swap's are meant for the time when the device fails and you take it out without taking the server down. Pulling a drive every 24 hours is not something hot swap is designed for and may end up causing failures doing it that regularly. It shouldn't do but as it's not designed for that then it's not advisable. Plus breaking the mirror that regularly isn't advisable either.

That's a problem. I need to keep a drive in the firesafe nightly. But I would like to do an automated back up off-site overnight every so often (During the day it would kill the shared internet connection as the upstream speed is only 0.47Mbps). :(

I suppose I could set it to backup to another drive connected to the USB. I really hate USB caddys though.

Have a USB disk attached to the rear of your NAS.

Schedule it's backup sometime throughout the day, ideally soon before you plan to lock it away so you capture the current days changes.

Lock the USB safe in the disk at night and your RAID array won't be at risk through constant breaking and recreation of the mirror.

Have you considered backing up into the Cloud??

Netgear offer a cloud based backup solution called ReadyNAS Vault

Subscription :nono:

This is what the overnight back up does; it'll VPN to my NAS at home :)

Its going to be pain to use the USB drives - unless there is way to get it to mirror instantly when data is manually written to the NAS (in addition to the automated backups).

Good heads-up, seems a really good deal. I really dont know what to do now. To be honest I only want to save work related data, accounts, invoices and stuff so the Stora would be more than enough if I bought another drive and mirrored.

Its just that for a few quid more you can get the Readynas duo and I might regret not going that bit better. However, my real concern with this is, I may never be able to set it up properly.

I used to be indecisive...but I'm not sure now :D

Your data obviously isn't that important then.

Yes it is, that is why the data sets are kept in two different places (five redundant pieces per set), with one complete set off site, both where I have direct control, with full actual knowledge of its physical location and the people who have access to it. That's just for three computers and a laptop.

You don't need to pay a subscripton to protect data :cuckoo:

Thanks for the concern anyway. :)

Gah I'm torn between the Stora and the ReadyNAS. Having read up a bit more the ReadyNAS does seem to take a bit more fiddling to get the most out of it but at least once you've bought it that's it, no subscription to services needed.
Having said that, I think I'd only ever want to use the 'premium' features of the Stora a few times a year. Then there's the Bit Torrent aspect that's on the ReadyNAS....

If the Stora had the Bit Torrent app I'd go for that one...
Netgear... Make it so!

All I meant was you can't expect all enterprise 'cloud' solutions to be free. (edit: Although I have just realised you're only backing up 3 pcs and a laptop)

:)

Hey no worries :) Clouds have their uses and I'd never expect them to be free, but there are always alternatives, especially for the small fry like me.

Think I may have cracked the firesafe problem: Configure the backup button to backup to the USB drive, so it can be performed as and when it is plugged in. Question is notification of completion, so it can be unplugged and put away when complete. I presume it should be able to email me when its finished.

Now, ReadyNAS Duo or NV+?....SSH vs SSL(https) for remote backup? hmmm, think I'll pop into the other thread for that :thumb:

The NV+ sends an e-mail notification when the backup job is complete. :)

What you could do is have the device do an incremental backup just before the end of the working day, the only pain is doing the initial 'full' backup but once that's done your incremental backups won't take that long.

With the NV+ you program the Backup button so when pressed it performs backups you've specified.

:)