Hyper Backup and Best File format

[SmallTownUSA]

Morning All,
I have a couple of questions regarding the use of Hyper Backup and a suggested file format. I have three NAS (1520+, 218+, and 220+ -- all running the latest DSM 7). I have decided to make my first line of "defense" against data loss/corruption by creating Hyper Backups to external USB drives (one 12TB and one 6TB). The 1520 and 220 will be backed up to the 12TB and the 218 to the 6TB. Both these USB drives will be stored off-site.
Q. 1: Is there any advantage/disadvantage to using Hyper Backup?
Q. 2: Is there any advantage/disadvantage to using the exFat format? (According to Synology, all three of my NAS can support exFat)
Q. 3: I have created test backups of the 1520 and 220 to the 12TB USB and verified the backups. This required attaching the 12TB drive to each NAS separately. All seemed to have gone well. However, is there any reason why I should not put two different NAS servers on one USB drive?
Q. 4. Is there any way to get a file "listing" of the USB drives w/o attaching them back to their respective NAS?
Thanks for the help,
Harold

 

[fredbert]

If you connect the USB drive to a Mac/PC then they can mount the exFat file system, you can then access the HB multi-version backup using the desktop Hyper Backup Explorer application.

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If you used HB single version backup then you can just access the files and folders directly. And exFat is ok with HB.

You can run Hyper Backup Vault on one NAS, the one with the USB drive connected, and have the other NAS backup though that. The HB Vault NAS would just backup normally to local USB drive, others would have a task to backup Synology NAS.

My preference has been to rename the USB drive's shared folder. If I have to move backed up vaults to a bigger/new USB drive I will name this new drive's shared folder to be that of the old USB drive... the HB tasks won't notice the swap-over and you don't have to recreate them. Otherwise you'll be making tasks to usbshare1/2/3-/3-2/etc depending how you partitioned the drive and how many drives you've already attached.

 

[SmallTownUSA]

Fredbert,
Many thanks for the input. I'll utilize the information as I proceed forward.
Thanks again,
Harold

 

[sstanzel]

Did you run into issues with special characters and exFat? I am seeing errors like this and it stops Hyper Backup running the task, rather than skipping the file. I'm just starting my testing but I think I'm going to need to go with a different file system. Changing the files names with issues would not be worth the effort. I see older posts about how to apply file filters in Hyper Backup but in my version on DSM 7.1.1-42962 Update 3, I don't see this capability anywhere.

[Local to share][lava] Incomplete file backup. (Failed to copy file because filename includes \/:*?"><| These are not supported by FAT file system.) [ .../snapshot of recycle_Pictures_2023-1-3/Pictures to Import Suspected Duplicates/import issues/iPhone to LR Classic import errors 3?.txt]

 

[halloleo]

[Local to share][lava] Incomplete file backup. (Failed to copy file because filename includes \/:*?"><| These are not supported by FAT file system.) [ .../snapshot of recycle_Pictures_2023-1-3/Pictures to Import Suspected Duplicates/import issues/iPhone to LR Classic import errors 3?.txt]

Sorry, I cannot help, but I think this is pretty scary! Maybe it is not a Hyperbackup issue, but just an issue between the two filesystem formats (btrfs and exFAT)?

 

[fredbert]

I have just picked out a memory stick and tried creating new folders on Mac and Windows machines. The file system happened to be FAT32 (I expected it to be exFAT, but hey!). Neither permits a new folder name to contain colon ':' but the Mac allows a folder name to contain a question mark '?'. On Windows the ? was shown as a different character but didn't rename the underlying folder.

I found another memory stick, this time exFAT, and the Mac could create a new folder with ? in the name, 'name with ?'. I then took this stick and connected it to my NAS and assigned read-write access to my normal user account.

I then SMB-mounted the USB share on my Mac, along with a normal shared folder on the Btrfs volume...

In the normal shared folder, on the Mac I created a new folder 'name with ?' and in File Station on DSM I added the subfolder 'name has ?'. This was displayed in File Station as:​

​

In File Station I copied 'name has ?' to the USB share. This is how the previous Mac created 'name with ?' and the copied 'name has ?' are displayed:​

​

Attempting to create a new folder 'name contains ?' in File Station on the USB share failed.​

​

Going back to the MAC and the mounted USB share I, again, tried to create folder 'name contains ?' and both in Finder and Terminal the attempts failed.​

​

A final note is that the SMB mounted USB share on the Mac excludes listing the original 'name with ?' folder that was created on the USB drive when connected to the Mac: only the copied 'name has ?' folder is listed.​

So I would conclude that '?' is permitted on FAT32 and exFAT but it is the operating system that is restricting creation of items with names that include their [the particular OS's] excluded characters. In the case of DSM it is probably refusing characters that Windows will reject.

If you are doing a multi-version Hyper Back task to an exFAT drive then this should work as it doesn't use the original file/folder names in its vault.