Backing up … 
Now that I have this impressive 1.3 Terabyte system sitting in my living room I guess its time to write about my impressions.
As I have written before, I bought the bare bones system in Japan where I found it to be quite cheap. On the other hand, I got some very good prices for harddisks here in Korea. So I decided for two pairs of Samsung Spinpoint HD501LJ because reviews showed them to be both cool and quiet. And its true. The only time you can hear the disks in the system is when they spin-up and unlock the head. While running, you have to put your ear to the case to hear little seeking "shrrd".
Setup
The
ReadyNAS NV+ itself was easy to set up. I mounted the disk into the trays and they slide nicely into the frame. After that, all you have to do is switch the system on and wait. You can select from several RAID levels, but I decided to stay with the proprietary X-RAID for expandability. It takes a while to format and sync all disks, but after that's done you can start using the NAS.
For some security and to still have a usable system I set up user security, which simply means to add users to the system. So, me, my wife and a backup user. Two shares on the big volume and we are done. The backup share holds the now automated backups and the media share is for streaming and keeping music and videos.
Services
By default you have access using CIFS (Samba, SMB, Windows) and AFP which should be fine for most people. I switched off the CIFS support as we only have Apple computers around for the time being. Instead I switched on the DAV support which seems to work much better regarding file streaming. Actually, watching the "
Sandmann" hiccups using AFP, but the DAV works fine.
The NAS provides media streaming services for iTunes, UPnP and some Home Media server stuff I have not yet found out what it is for. It also has an rsync server for easy backups, but it turned out to be not useful for me.
The Backup
Now for the most interesting part. With the ReadyNAS you get a copy of
Dantz Retrospect for Windows, Apple and Linux. At first it seems to run fine, but some
reviews show that you have to be very careful with most backup software.
So testing was in order. I tested Retrospect and while it seems to work it has some disadvantages. Its clumsy to use and it cannot automatically mount the NAS, so I removed it after a few tries. Then I have tried rsync but the problem here is that the rsync server on the NAS is not user-aware and stores all files as root on the NAS. For some reason that and that I could not find it preserving the OS X file properties made me stop using it as well.
So what do you do then? I have had very good experiences with the
Unison File Synchronizer. That is the software I used successfully to synchronize several Macs with and I use it at the moment to keep a copy of my home directories on a server
far far away. Its always good to keep copies somewhere on a different continent.
Directly synchronizing via AFP to the NAS turned out to be unreliable due to the fact that the
Netatalk server keeps screwing up the file permissions. The solution is to use an expandable disk image on the NAS, mount it locally and synchronize to it. As the disk images are
btree'd data storaged they work quite well over the network.
The disk image together with Unison works quite well, and after setting up to also store copies of older version of files this is my way for backup. All packaged into an
Automator plugin for
iCal automates the whole process. Once a day for the NAS and once per week to the other continent. Makes me feel much better now.
What next?
Well, the ReadyNAS NV+ needs a memory upgrade. Only 256MB has some impact on performance. Upgrading to 1GB might speed it up by 12%. Then there is still no media streaming client in our household at the moment, so I am looking forward what how well the ReadyNAS performs there.
