I’m planning to start using Kopia to back up data between two NAS devices. The current source NAS (let’s call it NAS-A) will soon be decommissioned. I’ll migrate its data to a new system (NAS-A2) using rsync. The goal is to use NAS-B, as a backup server.
Given that, I’m wondering: Should I start using Kopia now on NAS-A and back it up to NAS-B, or wait until the migration to NAS-A2 is complete?
My main concern is avoiding redundant backups - I want to make sure that once NAS-A2 takes over and connects to the same Kopia repository, it won’t re-upload everything again due to being a different host.
What’s the best approach here to ensure a smooth transition and avoid unnecessary data duplication in the backup repository?
Start using Kopia now, because it’s never a bad thing to have backups!
One of the main features of Kopia is deduplication. Kopia will detect that the file (or parts of it) is already present in the repository, and not upload it again.
The main question is if NAS-A2 will be using the credentials of NAS-A, or you want to create new credentials for NAS-A2. If you are re-using the credentials, you don’t need to create new policies for NAS-A2 and NAS-A2 will see the complete snapshot history of NAS-A. The cleaner approach is to have separate credentials (and policies). If NAS-A2 needs to see the snapshot history of NAS-A you can use kopia snap copy-history (or move-history), although that’s pretty slow.
Data and metadata are stored in separate blobs, and only data blobs are deduplicated. Timestamps and permissions will be restored properly. But some special attributes and filetypes can’t be restored.
