Choice of backup repository type

[selva]

I've a smallish setup that backs up a few Hyper-V VMS and a couple of physical hosts (using agent) to a Synology NAS. All managed by B&R 10. I've opted for using the NAS as a Linux server with direct disk access. To me this looks like the best option in terms of performance, though it doesn't appear to be a popular choice -- reading the documentation, as well as discussions in various threads here I only see most users debating about NFS vs SMB vs iSCSI.

Is there any advantage of exposing the backup space as an iSCSI LUN to the Hyper-V host or another Windows server, format it as NTFS and backup to it instead of what I'm doing? I understand iSCSI allows use of file systems such as ReFS, but see no reason to use SMB or NFS as target with a Linux-based NAS.

[HannesK]

Hello,
If you can format the Linux server (NAS system) with XFS (it also allows block cloning), that's probably the smartest way. The advantage of iSCSI over SMB / NFS is, that you can format it with REFS. Well, today also XFS with block cloning.

but see no reason to use SMB or NFS as target with a Linux-based NAS.

agree. the reason for NFS over SMB (and only over SMB) is that NFS supports write through.

If you can use the NAS storage as Linux repository, go for it

Best regards,
Hannes

[selva]

Great to know that makes sense. Unfortunately Synology uses ext4 and btrfs; no support for xfs out of the box. So its ext4 for now -- not confident that critical backups can be entrusted to btrfs as yet. Have been also testing a second Linux server with xfs which works great. Thanks for confirming.