The DNS-323 is an incredibly affordable and customizable NAS which I’ve thrown into my mixed LAN consisting of OSX, Linux, and Windows boxes. In my particular set up, I have two 2 TB Western Digital EARS Caviar Green drives. Instead of configuring them in RAID-1 mode, for the added stability, I’ve decided to use them as individual drives with an RSync cron job copying the contents of one drive to the other at 4 AM each day.
Here’s the command I use to run Rsync.
/mnt/HD_a2/ffp/bin/rsync -rpv --size-only --delete --exclude=.DS_Store --exclude='Temporary Items' --exclude='Network Trash Folder' /mnt/HD_a2/NAS/ /mnt/HD_b2/Several things to note:
- Files in the destination partition which do not exist in the source partition are automatically deleted.
- Modified files are only written from the source to destination if the size has changed.
- Rsync recurses into directories.
Remember that RAID-1 configurations are NOT the same as backups. Why? If you delete data on one partition, depending on your configuration, it will automatically get deleted on the other. Eh, semantics if you ask me. In my network, the DNS-323 serves as a NAS and as a backup. 🙂
Also, to get Rsync set up on your DNS-323, spend some time following the walkthroughs at the DNS-323 Wiki.
On another note, because my NAS is used in an environment with different operating systems, I occasionally run the following command to clear out resource forks (file names preceded by “._” courtesy of OSX).
find . -name "._*" -exec rm '{}' ; -print
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