Yeah, all my critical data lives on Dropbox as well as being backed up on my MBP's Time Machine backup (Come to think of it, that same Dropbox folder is backed up on a Time Machine drives for my computers at home, too).
I was just hoping there was a way to avoid this happening. I'd rather have one big happy backup, as I have data (email specifically) that I've left archived, but I guess I'm going to have to pull it out and start over.
I just hate that every time it happens, it takes about a day and a half for the full backup to sync, which kills my Parallels VM I have running.
I have gigabit ethernet between my Mac and my TC/USB drive so it takes less than 24 hours for me to be up and running with a fresh ~200 GB TC backup.
Parallels? Every time somebody loads Windows on a Mac, a little kitten dies.
Not opposed to anything, but it doesn't look like the media is the issue here as much as the AX.
What's the advantage of using a Synology NAS in a AX in this case?
I have Synology, AX and TC. The AX and TC are not ready for prime time in my opinion. The Synology drive is an ARM based Linux box with excellent performance for file sharing and you can run your apache/php web site including wordpress, joomla, drupal, etc from the thing if you want to.
For one thing, the TC has internal drives. If there is a problem, you mail all your data off to Apple and it comes back empty. The AX is a better solution because you are using a usb drive for data and if there is a problem with the AX, your data never leaves your house. But I'm really not a huge fan of the whole "my router is my NAS" scenario.
So what I have today is this: AEBS (which I referred to as AX above) which acts as router only. I was getting spotty wifi so I switched off the AEBS wifi. My TC is providing wifi in bridge mode and I ignore the internal drive and use a usb drive for my TM to TC backups. I've heard and have had some experience which seems to confirm that the TC caches OSX updates. My first update is slow but subsequent updates are so fast they seem to be "cached" which is what I've heard the TC will do automatically.
BTW, I do NOT use TM with my Synology drive. I suppose I could but I'd rather run TM backups to an HFS+ formatted drive and the Synology NAS uses a Linux filesystem (as do many other 3rd party NAS boxes).
Several advantages of the Synology for me are: (1) BYOD (Bring your own drive), (2) DLNA (media server) and (3) and low power consumption. By putting in a WD green drive, the thing uses less than 18 watts when running and 6 watts in standby. That saves about $100 a year in electricity (estimated) versus running some Linux distro on an old PC chassis for NAS. It is also less power hungry than running an old Mac mini as an NAS box / airplay server. On the Synology, I get DLNA and can stream audio, video and photos while staying within that 18 watt power budget I mentioned earlier.
If the Synology NAS ever breaks, I can replace the NAS box, pop in my old drive and keep on running. If the drive ever crashes, I can swap it out, put in another one and restore it from a second NAS box I have mirroring the first one. I don't bother with RAID. I'd rather have a completely separate redundant NAS box. There are many utilities available for Unix and OSX to automatically sync two folders so with minimal effort I keep one box looking almost exactly like the other one just in case either one croaks.