One of the best features of having a NAS is the ability to move the storage around. One of my client have a SAN storage that is rented out for specific jobs and last week I was asked to take a full “dump” of the data to two sets of Promise NS4300N NAS with 4 x 2Tb HDD each… no problem but the data is about 7Tb so it was really time consuming to say the least…
I hooked the Master NAS to a Gb switch and begun the copy and it was done few days later so next was to replica the same data to the backup NAS for redundancy. I didn’t want to dedicate a computer for the backup and I didn’t want to do this onsite, so I decided to use a feature in the Promise NS4300N NAS called NAS Replication when I will get back to the office. I tried this but found out it has some annoying flaws.
First few NAS Replications I tried gave me errors and the NS4300N doesn’t have any logs unless sent by email from NAS so I figured out after some trials and errors that the file structure has to be exactly the same on the master and backup NAS and this is a big FAIL as the master has 48.860 folders…
I remembered an old xcopy command that will copy file structure but not files and I refreshed my DOS knowledge here…. BINGO
I mapped master as Z:\ and backup as Y:\ and used xcopy z:\ y:\ /t /e
/t for folder structure and not files
/e for copying the empty folder as well
This took about 30 minutes but afterward I had the same file structure on both Master NAS on the Backup NAS…
So I started the NAS Replication and it worked…
Just though you should know