So it has been a year now since I migrated to QNAP to find that, yes it is a wonderful great boxy NAS but nevertheless it is still a single device that can fail in many murphyish ways despite that it is formatted as a raid 6 (meaning it will take two drive failures before you lose your date) and a 3 year over the counter exchange if the device ever goes dead (paid an extra $60 for that privilege) and not that my data is that important but I’ll still be crying if I lose any of it, I still need to back up all my data.
For those who are using an EX2 ultra, a reminder that you still have to back up even if you have mirror drives because it only takes one virus or someone that hack into your system to alter/delete your files and because it is mirrored, both copies will be altered or deleted. Yes it was after that I bought an EX2 thinking that “Yay Mirrored” before I realize that I should still backup. I even thought that with the QNAP raid 6 double drive failure, that I will never need to backup again but I realize that I was wrong after spending all that money because if you ever drop your NAS you realize that all your data/memories are in that one single box.
Luckily I still have my two My Personal My Clouds that I had to dig through my storage boxes to set up and after booting up with RED LEDs (grrrrr WD way of telling me that I’m using 95% storage) and not that it is dead in the waters; seriously WD you should change this and leave the LEDs alone and only have RED LEDs if the device is never returning from a chkdsk or some other system error. Blinking LED for no ethernet connection and really slow blinking LED for 100Mbit connection. Nope WD uses Red for everything other than blue which says it is ok.
Anyways the backup process will take a week to compare and backup changes to 12TB of data split into two My Cloud 8TB drives; Media and Photography.
Just a couple of notes that if you were cleaning up your My Clouds by deleting huge folders full of data, SSH into the device and use “rm -r ” instead of deleting it from your MAC or PC. I have found that it takes up to several hours to delete a folder from the Mac that has 125,000 directory entries. From the terminal SSH, rm -r takes about 10 seconds for any size directory. My suspicions is that for every file that needs to be deleted is a delete file command issued by the Mac one file at a time thus consuming your life at an exasperating slow rate. This was always the part that I hated the most when cleaning up a hard drive but luckily I decided to use rm instead to save my sanity.
I am doing my backups manually because after all these years I still don’t trust rsync; e.g. If you rsync the wrong direction you might end up restoring your old copy of your data instead of backing up your new data. Yes that is where you test and re-test before using a script that you run once a year 
but I said this last year and because of my age I tend to procrastinate a lot. Also remember that rsync will delete files that have been deleted from your main copy or files that have been altered will also be copied. So if you have this set as a cron run by the time you noticed that a virus has already altered or deleted all your main files, a cron run rsync will have rsynced your backup. Thus I do my backup once a year manually
I use a software tool called “Beyond Compare” that compares two directories or drives for changes. Just by comparing name and timestamps, the tool is very quick. Your backup drive is simply an exact copy of your main drive so that if your main drive fails, you have a drive that can be put to use immediately. You can also binary compare the files so that if you suspect that there has been file copy errors, a binary compare will ensure that you have an exact copy.
Oh yeah, an interesting error popped up when mounting from the Mac. If I mounted each shared folder individually from the same My Cloud, the second and third folders mounted do not have the proper permissions marked with a red “-” disallowing access. To get access to multiple shared folders I had to use browse and “connect as” to sign in with the proper credentials and then I can select all the shared folders that I want to access. I think that this is either an error from WD or perhaps some process that I killed in my zest to kill the scan process.
With the recent purchase of the Oculus Quest I have found that I still have the need for a NAS for 3d files of a bachelor nature and these files are between 10 to 20GB in size. With the Clouds back in operation and after back-up, I might just use the clouds instead of the QNAP because the My Clouds are much more quieter than the QNAP. However the My Clouds are easier to store off-site than the QNAP so perhaps not.
Anyways since I am using my Personal My Clouds again for backing up my QNAP, I thought I should drop by and post up.
