Advice on a backup solution and NAS over cat6

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Hi there

Does anyone have any suggestions or advice on the following? I have a MacBook running Snow Leopard and I've had cat6 wiring put in around my house, as I'm having a motorised satellite system installed complete with PVR enabled receiver. I'm also planning in the next few years to buy a 42" scanner, which will also use the network.

As a result I'm looking into back up options for my MacBook using the effernet connections because it should back up much faster than via firewire 400. However I'm also interested in being able to store my larger files centrally, of course not on the same hard drive as the backup drive. I might then be able to connect to this from my Satellite receiver.

I currently backup using Time Machine to 1.5TB hard drive. OF that 1.5TB, 160GB is partitioned and a weekly clone on my internal hard drive is taken, so I have a bootable device if required. I also have two external 500GB hard drives, which Time Machine backs up, along with the internal hard drive.

I've come across NAS but I've read they don't support HFS+ journaled, which my hard drives all now are. I'm also concerned that I might lose attribute information or dates and times might get changed if I backup to another format. I've had issues with timestamps when connecting to my Mac hard drives in a virtual Windows 7, through VMWare Fusion 3.

Thanks for reading

 

[kapp]

Hi,

A NAS solution would work well. The thing with NAS is that it is Network attached storage, and so a network file protocol will apply, for example CIFS or AFP. AFP is the obvious first choice for an Apple environment. I have a ReadyNAS NV+ running AFP which works in this manner. Generally, I think a NAS device is better than a plain HDD as you get the benefits of redundancy, even a hot standby disk if you are really paranoid. There are a range of products out there now, but I can testify that the NetGear ReadyNAS range works well with Apple, and they can act as a Time Machine backup target too.

Oh, btw, the other advantage with NAS devices is that they can usually run multiple protocols at once, so for example I have mine set up to run AFP for Apple, CIFS for Windows. Same files, different protocol.

 

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Thanks for your reply kappa. I will look into the protocols to get a better understanding on it all. I actually have an old PC laptop which I sometimes use for printing so I should even be able to connect that to.