NAS Backup

Before creating a NAS backup job, you need to first add the NAS shares to Vinchin Backup & Recovery and get the NAS shares licensed for backup. Please refer to NAS Shares for more information.

Create NAS Backup Job

Step 1: Backup Source

First you need to select a target NAS share from the Select NAS Share column for this backup job. Each NAS backup job can only have one NAS share selected.

After selecting the target NAS share, please select the files or folders you want to back up from the Backup Source column. In the Select files/folders column, the files/folders could be selected by use the checkbox.

After selecting the files/folders, you can click Advanced to set wildcard filter rules for the NAS backup job, this is optional.

In the Wildcard Filter dropdown list, you can choose None, Exclusion and Inclusion.

None: backup all the selected files/folders which you've selected and do not use any filters. Exclusion: backup all files except the ones to be excluded by exclusion filters.

Inclusion: only backup the files which will be matched by the inclusion filters.

In the Filter field, type a filter rule e.g.: *.docx and click Add to add it; multiple filters can be applied to a single backup job; * can match 0, 1 or multiple characters, ? can only match 1 character.

After setting the wildcard policy, please click on Next to continue.

Step 2: Backup Destination

In the Target Node dropdown list, you can select a backup node on which you want the backup data to be processed and stored.

In the Target Storage dropdown list, the storages which belong to the selected backup node can be selected.

When done selecting the backup storage, please click on Next button to continue.

Step 3: Advanced Strategy

In the General Strategy it including Schedule, Throttling Policy, Data Storage Policy, Retention Policy and Advanced Strategy.

In the Schedule field, you can configure the time schedule of the backup job, you can configure the job as a Backup as Scheduled job or an Once-off Backup job.

For a once-off backup job, the job will only run for once, and only full backup will be performed. You only have to appoint a time of when to start the backup job in the Start Time field.

For a backup as scheduled job, you can schedule Full Backup, Incremental Backup and Differential Backup.

Here we take full with incremental backups as an example.

Please set the backup mode and backup schedule as per your actual demands, then please click on Next to continue.

Throttling Policy settings are optional, only if the backup jobs will bring network or I/O overload to your production environment, you can configure the throttling policy accordingly otherwise leave it unconfigured.

There are 2 options in Data Storage Policy section, Data Compression and Data Encryption. By enabling these 2 options, the backup data will be compressed and encrypted before saving into backup storage.

For the retention policy of the NAS backup, there are 2 retention mode, retain the NAS backups according to Number of Restore Points or Number of Days.

For the retention mode Number of Restore Points, Vinchin Backup Server will save the specified number of restore points. If you choose to retain the backups by number of restore points, the number will be counted by full restore points.

For retention mode Number of Days, Vinchin Backup Server will save the restore points within the specified number of days.

When the retention policy is triggered, the outdated restore points will be purged to comply with the retention policy.

Advanced Strategy contains transfer threads and scan threads. You can set 1 to 32 transfer/ scan threads for a single backup job. Increasing the number of threads can improve backup job efficiency, but multi-threading will occupy the resources of the NAS server, so the number of threads should be set reasonably according to the actual situation.

In order to eliminate the high efficiency backup impact on the performance of the NAS server, users can set the transfer and scan thread number to 1. And when the scan thread has been set to 1, users also able to configure the scan speed.

The scan speed can be configured with Very Fast, Fast, Normal, Slow and Very Slow options to balance the NAS server performance and backup speed.

Step 4: Review & Confirm

After completing the above-mentioned settings, you are able to review and confirm the NAS backup job settings in one screen.

You can give this job a customized name then click on Submit to finish creating this NAS backup job.