Backing up USB to NAS

Randomthom

Posts: 52   +18
Hi all,
I'm looking for a solution to what I think should be a very simple problem.

In the school in which I work, our media, art & photography courses use USB HDDs to back up a lot of student data. I'm aware that these little 2.5" drives are very volatile due to their ease of being dropped or their USB interface breaking etc.

I want to install a NAS or similar device (doesn't actually need to be networked but NAS seems the most likely way to find what I'm looking for.

It needs to be able to plug in a USB device and press a button to start backing up the device to it's internal HDDs.

I'm fairly sure that most of the NASes on offer will have this function or something similar but I can't find any real information on it. Any recommendations would be much appreciated!

Thanks
 
I don't have info on a specific NAS device that will provide you this functionality but in the hopes of broadening your choices I would say it shouldn't be difficult to write a script or batch file to do the backing up to the NAS. Just place that script in the root of your USB drive and whenever you plug it in run the file. This way you can focus on what I would consider more important features of a NAS devices such as RAID options, services such as HTTP/LAMP, media, surveillance, or something else you might find useful.
 
Most NAS only backup to USB, not the other way around. This may not be for every NAS, however is mostly what I have found. Why not just opt for a file server shared out. If you have more than 10 machines then you should be on a domain. Then you can use your domain server as your file share server. USB definitely should never be used for back up, NEVER. We do Flash NAND recoveries and this is the #1 mistake people make. SO you are wise in your quest to transfer data from these devices!
 
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