I am trying to figure out the benefits of internal backups. I can schedule and queue them, so I like that part of it. Unfortunately, I can not schedule or queue USB backups. There is also an option for incremental internal backups which sounds promising, although I am not clear on how it really works.
A backup to the same “internal” NAS is just making a copy of the files to a different area as far as I can tell. I initially had a RAID 5 configuration but decided that I will use RAID 1. I ended up with 2 volumes which, I guess, I could use the internal backup to sync files between the two volumes. My thought was that I could sync my computer/USB devices with volume 1 and then schedule incremental backups to volume 2. I could also swap the second mirrored drive of volume 2 with a 5th drive and place the mirrored drive in a protected fireproof safe and let the NAS rebuild/mirror the drive swapped in. I could then just rotate the swapped drives periodically.
The way I am seeing the configuration at the moment, I should have 2 mirrored copies of my data with a 5th drive protected in a fireproof, waterproof location. So I should have 5 copies (one protected from disaster) of my data, albeit not 100% in sync depending on how often I perform backups from computer(s), how often the internal backups are scheduled, and how often I swap the 5th drive. Not sure if this is over-kill, although I would rather error on the side of too much than not enough. Maybe I’m trying to force the internal backup feature with scheduling and queuing (missing from USB backups) into an overall backup approach, but maybe in doing so I’ve come up with a good approach - not sure.
My last question is how does the internal incremental backup work? Is there any versioning or will the destination location get updated with added or modified files from the source location? How do deleted files in the source get treated in the destination?
