I had been back up retro floppy disk images to Magneto-Optical (MO) disks or retro hard disk images to the clone hard disk drives or a non-redundant file server.
In Japan, MO was the most popular media among rewritable optical disks. The media is durable, and the data retention life is estimated to be 50 to 100 years.
I often extract the retro storage images from physical and emulator storages to image files recently, but I could not store some huge storage image files into MO disks because the maximum capacity is 1GB.
Therefore, I had been forced to store some extracted storage files into a non-redundant SSD-based file server.
Introducing QNAP NAS as Backup Storage for Retro Disk Images
For that reason, I decided to introduce a QNAP server to solve the permanent durability problem of the simple SSD-based file server to store the huge storage image files over 1GB more robustly.
I installed two 2TB hard disks for the QNAP server because some retro operating systems such as classic MacOS has some maximum network volume limitation.
For the backup storage, I connected two external USB storage, a 1.3GB MO drive (Fujitsu DynaMO 1300LT) and 2TB SSD storage (WD Elements Portable).
Using external backup storage drives, I created two backup jobs. The first job backups a shared folder for the retro floppy disk images to the MO disk and the second job backups a shared folder for the huge disk images and the other extra shared folders to the SSD drive.
Running QNAP NAS with Mobile Battery
I tried to use a mobile battery (Anker PowerHouse 200) with the QNAP server as an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for preventing the effects of natural disasters such as earthquakes too.
I have been run the NAS on this system configuration for 2 months, but the NAS was terminated abnormally at a time because the power output of the mobile battery stopped while going out.
I think that it might inappropriate to use the mobile battery as a UPS, but I would like to continue to run the QNAP server on the system configuration for a while.
Running QNAP NAS as AFP Server for Classic MacOS
For communicating old Macintosh machines with other recent network machines, I have been maintained a relay server of Apple Talk Filing Protocol (AFP) on Mac mini Early 2005 (Mac OS X v10.3 Panther).
However the QNAP NAS supports AFP protocols, so I tried to replace the Mac mini relay server to only the QNAP server.
I chose 2TB hard disks for the QNAP server to run as an AFP server for old Macintosh clients because the old file system, Hierarchical File System (HFS), is limited to the maximum volume size as 2TB.
According to the QNAP specification, the QNAP server support AFP v3.3. Macintosh machines installed MacOS 8.1 could not find the QNAP server automatically, but I could connect the QNAP server as the guest user by specifying the IP address directly using the MacOS chooser.
The unknown error dialog appeared about temporary items, but I could connect from MacOS v8.1 to the QNAP server as the guest user and read and write any files in the public shared folder normally.
However, It seems that QNAP server does not support the classic AFP v2.x completely, so I can not connect as a registered user with the password yet.
Running QNAP NAS as NetBEUI Server for Windows95
For communicating some retro Japanese computers which can run Windows95, and I have been maintained a Samba server on Ubuntu 18.04. So, I tried to connect from the Japanese Windows95 machines to the QNAP server too.
The classic MacOS computers could access the QNAP server with the default QNAP configuration. The Windows95 computers could find the QNAP server, but these could not access the server. For Windows95 computers, it seems that I have to modify the QNAP internal configuration [1].
In conclusion, I think that QNAP NAS is a suitable network backup and file server for retro computers including classic MacOS. The QNAP NAS offers various backup options, I would like to mirror the QNAP NAS folders to the current Samba server.