How to keep a copy of external drive on the NAS? (Mac)

Synology
1

Hi All, newbie to Synology here, but doing Ok so far thanks to Will’s videos.

I currently have a Mac mini backing up to a DS1522+ using Timemachine. All seems good there.

I also have an external Thunderbolt drive on the Mac, on which I keep photos. That’s part of my workflow for photos. I would like to keep a clone of that drive on the NAS as a backup. I don’t want to mix those files with the Timemachine backup (which handles all the personal files on the Mac). I’ve watched many of the videos about Synology Drive, but everything I’ve seen seems to be from the perspective of the NAS as a server, from which I can sync to the Mac including on demand (i.e. the Google Drive model). I would appreciate your recommendation on how to go the other way, i.e. to keep a clone of the drive from the Mac on the NAS (i.e. sync the other way). Thanks!

2

Well thanks anyway guys. I ended up using Synology Drive, in a once-daily backup mode, and it seems to work well enough. In summary:

  1. Activebackup seems to be too invasive (security settings, etc.) and unnecessary for my situation
  2. The Cloud tool seems to be replaced with Synology Drive
  3. I couldn’t tell whether to use Synology Drive in Sync mode, or in Backup mode with continuous backup, and settled on once-a-day, under the assumption that the external drive I have is unlikely to fail right after I do my work and before the backup runs. In theory I could also trigger an immediate backup every time I do a significant amount of work to reduce the risk.
3

I use external drives for photo library in Lightroom. I have used Carbon Copy Cloner to run backups from my external drives attached to my Mac to the NAS. It would start when drive was plugged in if it was after scheduled interval. I am now trying to move to using NAS primarily but making sure I have adequate backup process in place. Will’s videos on photo workflow are my desired objective. Already have the smart previews but I would bring along the main brick of an external drive or work without it when away. Hopefully your process is working well.

4

Thanks Ccch99, that is a good option. I did consider Carbon Copy Cloner, I have a license from a long time ago, but it’s not applicable to the latest version. So my choice was either to upgrade that, or to use Synology Drive, which was free with the NAS. In the end I decided to try Synology Drive, and it seems to be working fine for this application, so I’m continuing with it. The setup seems to be working well enough, it’s a simple use case.

5

Interested to hear how you set that up. I have the drive setup but it is syncing my main drive and mostly is just on demand cloud storage basically.

6

I pretty much followed Will’s video to set up everything on the NAS! I have the following:

  1. A timemachine job that backs up my Mac, using Timemachine, to the NAS

  2. A Synology Drive backup task that backs up my always connected external drive to the NAS. I decided to do a backup task rather than a sync task because I didn’t think I needed the instant backup from the Mac.

It all seems to be working. I haven’t had to restore anything, but if I go look at the files on the NAS it’s there, so I think it’s fine. I did set up snapshots on the NAS (again, following Will’s videos). Hope this helps. As I said, nothing fancy at all.