Is there a recommended product to backup the WD My Cloud using the safepoint function? A WD support employee said they recommend another My Cloud however that seems strange since you don’t need network connectivity on the backup.
Should I use a My Book with equal or greater capacity? The My Book 6TB seems to be out of stock everywhere by the 4TB is available.
What about My Book Duo? Would this mean triple redundancy since it has 2 drives? Perhaps that’s excessive.
I’ve also read many complaints about the Safepoint function. Would it be better to use SyncToy (or other software) to go from My Cloud thru the computer to another USB Device like the My Book 4TB? Seems like going thru the computer is an extra step in the transfer and additional management risk if the computer doesn’t trigger the application to run the backup.
The Safepoint technology essentially create a mirrored copied of your shares into a set of directories (one directory for each share). The files are just copied “flat”. It is a mirror, not a backup with retention of deleted/changed files.
In addition to the shares content, safepoint creates a few small files to backup the system configuration and manage the process.
So you need capacity that mirros the amount of data on your NAS, not more.
Safepoint to attached USB disk is curiously slow (about 10MB/s) even with USB 3.0 disks.
Using software on your PC to do the sync is fine, and it is about the same speed, despite the fact that the data has to roundtrip between the NAS, your computer and the target destination. If you have a great connection between your PC and your NAS, it will be faster to sync your NAS to a USB drive attached to your PC’s USB ports.
I use SyncBack SE to sync my Synology NAS to the WDMyCloud and I get about 15MB/S through Wireless-AC at 702mbps link. With this software, I can retain deleted and changed files as well.
Other posts report issues with SyncToy in the area of NTFS attributes.
