I have a corporate network running Windows Server 2012 R2 and the owner is considering putting a My Cloud Mirror on the network as a backup drive.
Since Win 7, Windows clients will only back up to NTFS formatted volumes.
I’ve been looking around and found people having problems backing up Server 2012 but not sure if it is the same problem.
I read the documentation for the My Cloud Mirror, but it doesn’t specify volume format and, since my suspicion is that the OS for this device is Linux, that it uses an EXT 3 or similar format.
So, does anyone know the format the My Cloud Mirror uses or if it can be formatted NTFS?
Pretty sure it uses EXT3/4. There is some difference in date/time storage between it and NTFS. You should however have no problem backing files from Windows to the MCM.
I handle my backups from the MCM to a My Cloud with an external USB using the Windows robocopy CMD. It works great and there is even a GUI interface you can download. It can easily be modified to backup from a PC to the MCM.
You can check out the batch file I wrote here.
The firmware on the MCM runs under Linux (or rather a cut-down version of it), so I think you’d basically screw it up if you tried.
But as the shares are available via SMB/CIFS plus also NFS and WebDAV if you enable them then there should be no issue to back-up there. And if all else fails you can make VHD files stored on the MCM and backup to those.
I appreciate where y’all are going here, but, that is how I currently was handling Win 7-10 backups with our old Server 2003 system. The problem is it basically doubles the load on the network by backing up and then copying backups.
What I want to do is backup DIRECTLY to the MCM.
If you are familiar with doing that, that is, backing up directly from Windows 7,8, or 10 to an MCM with Windows backup software, that is what I want to do.
I think you got the wrong My Cloud NAS for the job, unless the My Cloud Mirror has an iSCSI target facility. If not then you need to get an DL series NAS (the DL2100 or DL4100) then you can create an iSCSI target. On the Windows server you would set-up an iSCSI initiator and the target will then appear as a blank hard drive on the Windows 2012 server. You can format the iSCSI target to NTFS and apply full NTFS ACLs, accounting etc, but you won’t be able to access the files directly from the NAS. you can only access the iSCSI target from another computer what has an iSCSI initiator pointing to the target.
What the My Cloud NAS will do is protect the iSCSI targert(s) [as you can have more than one iSCSI target on the NAS] using it’s RAID configuration. The physical NAS’s drive has to stay in the format and configuration otherwise you’ll end up with a rather expensive door-stop.
@Geof_Gibson - as I mentioned above, one way to do it as a “one stop” method is to use a virtual hard disk (VHD) as a target, with that file stored on the MCM. See here for an example article on how to do it.
Basically it’s a “hard disk in a file” which you store on the MCM and then mount on the machine you want to back up. It appears there as a local drive, and Windows Backup can do its back-up to it (it’s a nice little trick for the versions of Win7 Backup which can only backup to local drives and not network ones).
If you want to be doubly safe you can then offline backup those vhd files, hence you’ll have backups of the backups. You can also use them to easily limit the overall backup size, as you can set the vhd to have a maximum file size (equivalent to a maximum disk size) on a per user/file basis.
