14TB to back-up. Most efficient way to do this?

[djbigley]

I'm going to give as many details as I can here so that I can receive the appropriate answers. I've contacted the help line and didn't get very far while receiving conflicting answers. I have 14TB on a NAS (hooked up to my home PC) that I want to back up to dropbox. I still want to retain everything on my NAS as well, this is for online storage only. I have an unlimited business advance plan. I was told that syncing my nas and manually backing up were the same thing, which I believe is incorrect. Originally, I was using the DB website and manually drag and dropping files over, 10 at a time. I got through a few thousand and it just became more and more difficult. Website was becoming unresponsive, crashing, etc. After contacting the help line, they told me that I should just "copy" and "paste" over my entire drive.

So, can someone tell me the best/most efficient way to go about this? Happy to answer any/all questions one may need to give me better guidance. I have a few thousand folders to backup, with subfolders in each, and then photos within them. Any and all help is appreciated. Thank you! 

[Megan]

Hi @djbigley, welcome to our Community! 

I'd be happy to guide you, and let you know how to backup your entire NAS drive with Dropbox. 

I apologize for my lengthy response, I just want to make sure that I give you all the info you need, in order to achieve what you need to do. 

Do you currently use or have installed the desktop app to your machine? When you install the app locally to your device, that creates a Dropbox folder with all of your content locally.

That folder syncs to your account online, therefore every action you take there, syncs online. You can copy, and paste your content at once there, and allow the changes to sync to your account, without any file/folder limit. 

However, I have to mention that using the app will use some of your hard drive space. Therefore, the best thing for you to do, would be to sync content in smaller bunches, and then make them available online-only. That way the files and folders wouldn't use your hard drive space.

Another option is for you to use our Dropbox Backup feature, provided that your NAS is detected as a single local external drive connected via USB, because network drives aren't supported.

If you have any questions, let me know! 

[jonsno]

If you’re comfortable with using the command line then you can use rclone. As long as you don’t have a 350gig file it should work flawlessly for your use case

[djbigley]

Do you mean 350gb in one single file? 99% are 2-3gb, I believe the most is probably around 20-25gb.

[jonsno]

Yeah one file of size 350gb is the size limit with rclone. You should be good to go