Synology DS211J to Samsung Story 3 Backup

After getting my Disk Station setup as detailed in a couple of earlier posts (part 1 and part 2) it is time to complete the final part of my backup solution, which is to get the drive backing up to a external drive, that I will store somewhere else (like in the office). I plan on doing this once a month or so at this stage but probably more often in the future depending on how much data I am adding and needing to back up.

First impressions are that this thing is sexy, but then again it did win a design award so that is no surprise, no fuss nice solid case, with a nice big rotary switch on the front that makes a solid clunk when turned. Love it! Much better than all the cheap enclosures that I have used in the past. If you want to read a review with performance figures and all that stuff you can check out this one from the guys at StorageReview.

Anyway it does USB 3 which for me at this stage doesn't mean much as I don't have anything else that supports it the only question it does lead to is: Do I need a funky cable to connect to a USB 2 host? Well thanks to this easy to follow picture from this page which provides backwards compatibility info.

I still need the USB 3 cable to fit in the socket on the back of the drive but it is fine for me to use an old extension cable I had lying around which is great because it means that I can keep the NAS hidden away in the cupboard but still back up easily.

On the Synology side of things it could be much easier, although I did have a slight mental blank and lose the local backup option. Simply fire up the "Backup and Restore" section of the control panel and select "Create" to create a new back up type. This wil fire up the Backup Wizard.

This presents options to back up the NAS to 3 different destinations.

1. Local Backup: Which backs up to a local USB drive. This is the option that I'm using.
2. Network Backup: Where you can select anywhere on the network as a destination and it uses rsync or rsh to copy files.
3. Amazon S3 Backup: Where you can back up to the Amazon Storage cloud and chose between encrypted or unencrypted storage, with a trade off in backup times with the encrypted option.

Once you select the backup type you pick which folders you want and the destination drive for the backup. You can also schedule the back up, which I will not be doing as I am not sure how often I will be connecting the external drive and will have to do the backups manually.

After the wizard completes you click go and the backup begins. In terms of backup speeds obviously we're restricted here by the USB speed. I am writing this while I wait for the backup to complete, currently it has completed 15 Gb in around half an hour giving a copy speed of a couple of minutes per gigabyte. I am not pressed for time or anything so the speed doesn't really concern me. I imagine that once the first full backup has complete I should be able to specify an incremental backup but I am not sure at the moment. 

Anyway, once again I am quite pleased with the ease of setup and use of this NAS and I have no complaints whatsoever about the external drive. In the future I'll get into setting up external, that is remote, access over the internet of the NAS and using the Torrent client.