As with all comparable data-management products, there are restrictions upon how NAS storage can be used to backup/recover data as follows.
| NAS storage mounted using SMB/AFP/NFS/HTTP/FTP... | ||
| Task | Supported | Notes |
| Backup to NAS | 
|
See note 1 below. Performance can be bettered with direct attached storage. |
| Backup from NAS |
|
See note 2 below. Avoid backup of data where metadata and performance are critical. |
| Archive to NAS |
|
See note 1 below. Performance can be bettered with direct attached storage. |
| Archive from NAS |
|
See note 2 below. Avoid backup of data where metadata and performance are critical. |
| Synchronize to/from NAS |
|
See note 2 below. |
| Backup2Go to NAS |
|
We require direct-attached NTFS or HFS filesystem. |
Note 1: Configure a Archiware P5 software disk-library (VTL), located on your NAS storage. This will be much slower than writing to a disk-library using equivalent direct-attached storage, consider using separate network interface to access NAS storage, keeping network traffic independent of LAN.
Note 2: NAS devices are intended to provide a simple means of sharing storage to network users using common network protocols e.g. SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS. They are not the same as direct attached disks or SAN storage and therefore there are limitations upon how products can access them as follows:
- Reading and writing permissions / ACL's / metadata / attributes is not possible or limited
- Permissions set on direct-attached disks will likely change when copied to NAS
- Network connections can and will fail leading to mounts being dropped and jobs failing
- HFS resources and NTFS file-streams cannot always be stored on NAS
- Compared to same disks attached directly, NAS will be significantly slower
General point about performance: Given that Archiware P5 is used to backup, archive and replicate large amounts of data, it's throughput is likely to be much higher than anything else you care to run. Therefore the relative poor performance of NAS will hurt you much more than you might realise.
We recommend: Archiware P5 implements it's own network protocol that removes all of these issues and ensures complete integrity of your data. To benefit from this, Archiware P5 needs to be running on a computer with the storage direct-attached, or mounted from a supported SAN. See requirements and compatibility.
Exceptions: SAN storage attached via iSCSI/Fibre is supported if it behaves like a locally attached filesystem, as opposed to using a network file sharing protocol (AFP/SMB/NFS). However you should consider that this can also be slower than a direct attached local filesystem. Make sure that the performance of the storage you're using is fit for purpose, use a Archiware P5 demo license to help test your proposed configuration.