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Druva offers you a viable, cost-effective way of storing, managing, archiving, and recovering your data on NAS devices. The key highlights of the Druva support for NAS devices are as follows:

The Druva components of NAS shares are:

Druva provides the following backup capabilities for NAS shares:

Druva initiates an automatic discovery of shares on the NAS device as soon as you add or edit the NAS device. You can also use the Discover Shares option to run a share auto-discovery on demand. Share auto-discovery is particularly useful when the NAS device has a large number of shares and manual addition one by one is cumbersome. You can still add shares manually if required. The share auto-discovery process runs at 01:30 AM UTC every 24 hours. The frequency or time of NAS share auto-discovery cannot be altered.

The following table explains the mapping required between a NAS proxy and NAS device to discover SMB and NFS shares.

The Discover Shares feature will automatically discover shares only if your NAS device is:

During manual backups, Druva only backs up data as defined in the backup policy. The backup window defined in the backup policy does not restrict a manual backup. Instead, it continues until all the data is backed up. In the event of a network connection failure during backup, the NAS proxy attempts to connect to the Druva Cloud. After the connectivity is restored, backup resumes from the state in which it was interrupted. Network bandwidth does not restrict a manual backup, as it uses the maximum bandwidth available.

Advanced Smart Scan uses a deterministic approach and performs file system scan efficiently. It optimizes the following aspects of the scan:

This reduces the overall time consumed during a scan, thereby significantly decreasing the incremental backup job's time. For more information on this method, see Scanning methods in NAS.

📝 Note
​ Advanced Smart Scan is supported for:

Druva allows administrators to configure pre-backup and post-backup scripts for NAS backups. The pre-backup scripts perform specific pre-backup tasks before backup jobs, while post-backup scripts perform specific post-backup tasks after backup jobs. You can configure the pre and post backup scripts in the backup policy. For more information, see Pre and post scripts for NAS.

Druva provides defined file types that you can exclude from or include in your backups. Each file type is associated with specific extensions that are listed when a file type is selected. You can also enter custom extensions if you do not find your extensions under any predefined file type. You can remove extensions from a file type without removing the entire file type. You can also enter file patterns for exclusions or inclusions in your backups.

The following table lists the file types that you can include and exclude from the backup policy.

📝 Note
​ For content rules created post 21 Dec 2020, no files types are excluded or included by default until you choose the Specify File Exclusions or Inclusions option while creating or editing a content rule. Druva recommends and excludes some folders from backups by default. For more information, see the Folders excluded from NAS share backup section. The existing functionality remains the same for content rules created before 21 December 2020.

Content rules created on or after 21 December 2020 will no longer have the All Executables and All Office Files file types. The file type Executables will contain all extensions in the older Executables and All Executables file type. The file type Office Files will contain all extensions in the older All Office Files and Office Files file type. Content rules created before 21 December 2020 will continue using the older file types selected for inclusion or exclusion. For older content rules:

📝 Note
​The extensions that were included or excluded in the older content rules will remain unchanged despite the change in the File Types.

Druva also backs up and restores the Symlink and Hardlinks file system objects. Note that only the link files are backed up and not the content of the files or directories they point to.

By default, Druva excludes certain folders from the NAS share backup, since both Windows and Linux operating systems contain system-specific files, which can be excluded from backup. For example, the Recycle Bin on the Windows server contains deleted files and folders, which won't require backup.

The following table lists the default folders that Druva excludes from the backup.