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Backing up a NAS drive to NAS destination

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I am planning to replace an older Windows desktop with a NAS drive, something like a Synology multi-bay enclosure.On a 4-bay Synology enclosure, each disk will be seen by multiple Windows computers as mapped drives . e.g.(M:), (N:), (O:) & (U).

I will also have another large HDD (attached to the same NAS via USB) and mapped as (K:). My intent is to do a nightly backup of NAS drives M,N,O & U to destination NAS drive K. They will be four sequential tasks,  initiated by one of my Win10 desktops on the network.

My question is, will Acronis recognize my source drives and my destination drives over the network? Will Acronis see them as simple mapped drives or does it need special syntax or commands?

I am concerned that the Windows managed Acronis may not function smoothly on a NAS drives managed by another operating system.

I hope somebody can help. Thanks.

Ashraf

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Ashraf, some comments based on my own use of a Synology NAS.

First, I never use Windows mapped drives to my Synology NAS as I consider this to be a big security risk should any malware get a foothold on any of my PC's!  That would expose my backups on the NAS to the malware.

The approach I use is to have a dedicated user account setup on the NAS (with no matching account on my PC's) that is only used by Acronis to create backups direct to the NAS.  I have other NAS accounts used for other reasons that access different data on the NAS.

Next, Synology provide its own backup tools that can be used to backup data from the NAS to a second NAS which do not require any interaction from a Windows PC and will be more efficient.

Note: for my Synology NAS with 2 x 3TB drives, the drives are seen only as a single destination by Windows as the drives are in a RAID configuration which would allow for a single drive to fail and be replaced without any loss of data.

Note 2: Acronis does not use Windows mapped drives for the NAS, it will always want to have a UNC path to the NAS along with user credentials, i.e. \\192.168.0.29\Backup for the path if using the IP address or \\MyNAS\Backup if using a network name.

Ashraf, I agree with the advice offered by @Steve Smith. I follow the same approach with my Synology NAS.

Ian

Steve, thanks for your advice and tips on this subject. Obviously, I have to rethink my game plan now that you have pointed out some limitations and disadvantages of my original approach.

Ashraf