Hello,

To back up my data, I currently have two internal SATA hard-drives and an application (SyncbackSE) that runs nightly. I know it still doesn't protect me from viruses that can delete all files on all connected devices but I have a bit too much data to save them to a hosted FTP server.

As a median solution, I was thinking of replacing that second internal SATA drive with a NAS that can be put to sleep, woken up by the backup application at night, and put back to sleep.

Is this possible? Are there other solutions I should know?

Thank you.

I know that some Synology NASes support WOL (Wake On Lan) so it is possible. I don't know about other makes, I usually use PC based NASes.

I do almost exactly what you are describing with a PC based backup NAS. My primary server wakes it up once a week to do backups then puts it back to sleep. As long as your backup software can run arbitrary commands before and after the backups then you should be fine. You can also use the Windows scheduler.

There are lots of wake on LAN utilties avalible. I use wol.exe from here.

I use Windows Home Server with the add-in Lights Out. Lights Out detects when a client is awake and wakes the server. In the middle of the night, when all the clients and the server are in standby Lights Out wakes the server, which wakes the clients for the nightly backup. Very reliable and power efficient.

Thanks for the info. I'll check what SOHO NAS are available that can be woken up through WOL.

I also have to build a new, completely silent Windows workstation that can really be put to sleep, including the CPU and PSU, and still be able to wake up in the middle of the night for SyncBackSE to run, wake up the NAS, do its thing, and have both devices go back to sleep.

That should save a bit of power.

Hopefully, full sleep mode is hardware-based so I can just move the XPSP3 disk to the new workstation instead of migrating to Windows7.

Get a synology NAS, I have one and they are brilliant! You can schedule it to turn off and back on for whenever you want. Mine turns off at 2 then comes back on at 8am. There's an app as well so you can quickly turn it off at any time. I haven't got around to setting up wake on LAN but its possible.

Great UI and a ton of apps to access your music, photos, docs etc from outside the house..

If that's a concern, there's another "median solution": have your file server automatically make hard links of your files and put the links outside of your shares. With a common sense configuration, your client devices wouldn't be able to erase the files from your server. The downside is that if you needed to delete files to free disk space immediately, you couldn't do it without logging on the server with administrative rights.

Thanks for the tip. I'll think about it and see what I can come up with.

There are ready-made shell scripts to do stuff like that with standard utilities. They even work on Cygwin'ed Windows but might ot work on some crippled pre-built NAS.