But my biggest concern is, how annoying would that be for the same thing on a Synology. Plus we've been slow this last week or so and I'm chomping at the bit to mess around.Ĭonfiguring single use time machine backups for multiple users that change often on an external hard drive is no big deal. But I like the idea of all 4 of us (the two PC techs included, who have their own external hard drive) being able to backup to a NAS rather than an external drive that gets passed around. We have a Synology diskstation at our bench that one of the other techs fixed at some point (it's a bit of a story). By comparison a straight 20 gig file copy from my Mac to a shared folder on the NAS took 3 min today. An incremental backup today of 46 gigs is showing it will take about an 50 - 60 min.
My first full backup took several hours over a 1gig wired ethernet connection to the NAS. Plus 2TB isn't huge depending on how many backups are on there and what devices we've backed up recently. It is working, however the backups are extremely slow. And we retain these backups for a few weeks post repair just in case. It also creates situations where backups might be deleted prematurely because it's been on the drive for a while and one of us (not me) doesn't realize it's still there for a reason. Secondly, if both of us need the drive at the same time it holds us up from getting repairs done. I have been here 5 months and I have to fight with the thing 50% of the time to get the drive to be recognized. Firstly, the drive we are using has one of those USB 3 micro b connectors on it (that I hate because in my experience they do not hold up well).
This is less than ideal for a few reasons. Our present method of doing this is an old 2 TB external hard drive that gets passed between us two Apple techs to process Time Machine backups onto. I presently work for an Apple Authorized Service provider and it's a pretty frequent occurrence for certain types of repairs that we have to perform data backups.