I have a huge digital library. My iTunes content alone is about 150GB of Movies, TV Shows, and Music from the iTunes store. But what is really space consuming is my 300+ GB of personal and family photos. Photography is a bit of a hobby of mine, and I have a tendency to digitally pack rat every photograph I take, regardless of quality. When this content was on my desktop’s hard drive I always worried about the potential to loose that data in a disk crash.

So I bought a Netgear Stora, a nifty little NAS with all kinds of features. The mirroring of my data on it’s two internal disks and the ability to back that up to an external USB disk eased my data loss fears. That is until I thought my house had been broken into while I was away on a business trip, knowing that my USB back up was still plugged into the NAS and the NAS was sitting right next to my router, I was certain it would be stolen and I would lose all of my data. I was relieved when I returned home to find out that indeed nothing had been stolen.

This how ever put me on the warpath to find an online backup service that I could backup all on my important, irreplaceable content to. If any of you have looked for services to back up your systems online, one of the first things that you will notice is that most services do not permit you to back up a NAS drive, and yes even mapped they can tell the difference; and those that do allow you to require a significant extra fee to do so. So I set out to find a way to back up my NAS to a services without such fees or restrictions, and I have finally found one.

The first step is to mount the location you want to back up. While this step can be skipped, it is actually easier to do this if you just mount the NAS first.

Windows:
net use DriveLetter: \NASpath

Mac OSX:
mkdir /Volumes/nas
mount_smbfs //username:password@NAS/path /Volumes/nas

Linux, UNIX:
mkdir /mnt/nas
mount_smbfs //username:password@NAS/path /mnt/nas

Now once you have mounted your NAS drive lets create a symbolic link to that mount point.

Windows:
mklink /D C:AnyPath DriveLetter:


Mac OSX:
ln -s /Volumes/nas /Users/username/anypath

Linux/UMIX
ln -s /mnt/nas /users/username/anypath

Of course the paths used can be changed to fit your environment or preferences. But this is just the general idea of what needs to be done. Now when you tell the application to back up something on your NAS(through the symbolic link path) it will not be able to tell that the path is not a physical path, thus allowing you to back up your data!