Synology NAS Incremental backups with BE 2014

[AllisonW]

I saw in some old forum posts (re: BE 2010) that someone was unable to do incremental backups on a Synology NAS because incremental backups were not supported unless an agent could be directly installed.  Have there been any changes to this since 2010 that might help me work around this?  This particular NAS does not support iSCSI, so I can't mount it directly...:-(

[Larry_Fine]

As far as I know, nothing has changed in this area.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH68920

What model of Synology are you using?  I was under the assumption that all of them supported iSCSI.

[AllisonW]

My bad; did some further digging and found it does support iSCSI (I just had some options greyed out due to how it's already set up).

I'll amend this to say that iSCSI is a last resort, since it would cause a lot of complication - there's already TBs of data on there shared as regular CIFS/NFS drives and it would take quite a bit of time and potential disruption to change it over.  If there's no other way I'll figure it out, but I was really hoping there was another option...

[Larry_Fine]

iSCSI is probably a better option if you were backing up TO the NAS.  When backing up FROM a shared NAS, I don't think you have much choice but to use CIFS so you can collect the shared data.  And that means only full backups. :(

[AllisonW]

With iSCSI, couldn't we just mount it to our Windows file server as a "local" drive (and share it to users from the file server), and then the Windows server's agent would take care of being able to do the incrementals?   There's way too much data on this NAS for us to be able to do fulls every day, and it's primarily media and archive data that rarely changes so it's a great candidate for incrementals from a space-saving standpoint.

[VJware · Accepted solution]

This should work. If an iSCSI LUN is presented to the server and a remote agent is present on that server, then effectively you can run incremental/differental backups of the data present in the LUN.

[pkh]

You should plan on doing full backups regularly.  Bear in mind that when you restore an incremental backup, you need to restore the last full backup and ALL the incremental backups between that full backup and the incremental backup that you want to restore.

Also, if you have a long backup chain, the entire backup cannot be deleted unless every backup set has expired.

[AllisonW]

We do plan on doing them regularly.  But it's multiple TBs of data, and it's only a handful of files that might change on most days, if at all.  So they definitely don't need to be done every day...

[pkh]

You might want to take a look at the BE Archive option which allows you to archive inactive files and you can just backup the archive.

[Larry_Fine]

Unfortunately, the BE Archive Option may not be a good long-term solution as it may be going away in the next BE version per the SCL

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH228477

[AllisonW]

Okay, that's what I thought.  So I have a last resort plan.  No other way to do this, though?  It's going to be a pretty long process to switch this over to using iSCSI because of how it' set up/populated right now.

Thanks!

[AllisonW]

Interesting; thanks, both of you!  I agree...if it's going to potentially get removed I don't want to build it into my plan.  Also, while it's definitely lightly changed, it is referenced fairly often (it's basically a media library), so I'm not sure I want to do any archiving of it that might affect how it's accessed.

[AllisonW]

Okay...it looks like the last resort plan is my option.  Guess I know what I'm doing all weekend...:-(  Thanks!