can I use rsync on Nas4free to backup TimeCapsule?

[jfabernathy]

I'm wondering if I can setup my NAS4Free box to backup my Time Capsule on a regular basis? I thought that maybe since the NAS4Free box is not doing much work most of the night, it could rsync my Time Capsule to a directory on the NAS.

Is this possible and how would I do it? I see talk about 2 NAS4Free clients rsyncing, but nothing about NAS4Free and another NAS.

I'd like to avoid all the traffic going from Timecapsule to workstation doing the rsync to NAS4Free.

[ijeffsc]

Interesting question. It seems theoretically possible.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/46 ... 0&tstart=0

I've tried using nas4free experimentally using sparse bundle setups to run time machine against. It worked sorta. I played with NFS and SMB connections but not afp yet. The backups ran for a while but when I upgraded to Mavericks I could no longer mount the sparse bundle. At the moment I run 3 copies of time machine disks at two or three geographical locations. I have had two complete disk failures of my time machine disk in the last few years so I no longer rely on a single duplicate copy.

One think the thread above highlights which is a time machine approach problem is that disks don't respond well to "the many small file" problem which exhibits its ugly head in a variety of ways. http://inquidia.com/news-and-info/worki ... oop-part-1 The particular problem I have encountered was with conventional file systems (NTFS and various *NIX's) generating millions of files. If my math is right I have about 100 million files on my mac and 186 million on my time machine backup disk. 50% of the inodes are consumed. Copying that order of files one at a time requires a few seeks per file. If a seek takes a few milliseconds and you have to do a billion of them, well a billion times a small number is still a big number so backup performance really slows down just finding the data.

The old OS guys seem to know how to handle this. Not sure the new ones do really.