I always the * next to the variable since you can convert most types into a pointer with the * modifier. Otherwise, this looks inconsistent:

char *p0;
char *p1, *p2;

Uwe Baemayr Senior Software Developer Micro Focus

I have two permanently connected USB drives on my Win2012R2 server: one backs up the operating system and apps for bare-metal restore (that was a Seagate 3TB which failed, now it's a "Fantom" 1.5TB drive) and a WD 5TB drive backs up other family member's desktop/laptops for bare-metal restore (Crashplan only backs up data). The Windows 2012 server & client backup software requires local drives for these functions, so I can't target the QNAP. These USB 3 external drives spin up when they're in use or "touched" by the server and a few times a week, I get health alerts saying they're too hot (the Seagate drive quickly hit 130F+ when under load, the WD drive is more reasonable). I actually have a fan on them and that really helps. I will say I found that USB 3 drives are more reliable than USB 2 when it comes to not dropping the connection to the computer. That was always a problem with USB 2 and E-SATA. Lots of drive reboots. The other USB 2 and 3 drives are disconnected and stored and I manually back up my music library a couple of times a year for safekeeping. Twice over the years, when reconnected, the drives were unreadable. They'd spin up but the server gives me the dreaded "The USB device could not be recognized" or "has failed". That's when I started putting more stuff into Crashplan. I also use old bare drives for offsite backup (family recordings, photos, videos) and that's been reliable.

Uwe Baemayr Senior Software Developer Micro Focus

I look at it the other way 'round -- a year of cloud backups is the cost of one external drive and my external drives don't last longer than a year or maybe two. I have a pile of external USB drives and they are just incredibly unreliable. That's why I got the QNAP for local backups/redundancy -- largely filled it with 3TB drives extracted from USB cases that kept overheating or simply wouldn't connect to the host. I know these drives are de-tuned but they seem to work fine and they're a lot happier in the actively cooled QNAP server. This does assume that your ISP doesn't impose a transfer cap, of course. Otherwise the economics change.

Uwe Baemayr Senior Principal Software Developer Micro Focus

I can't tell if you're trying to back upt he QNAP over the network or if you're referring to a native QNAP Crashplan app. My QNAP server (Intel-based TS-851) oes offer a Crashplan app -- I have installed it but never tried it. I mostly use the QNAP to back up a Windows 2012R2 Server and that does run Crashplan, which works very well and is unlimited. I use the $15/month family plan which protects 5 machines -- very reasonable and I have 4-5TB of RAW and TIFF photos and DV family videos in their system. I recently signed up for Amazon's unlimited storage ($60/year, I believe) and have been experimenting with using odrive to sync server directories to the Amazon cloud. It offers local encryption/decryption so if the cloud account is hacked, they would see just a bunch of random directory names and filenames. odrive is still a work in progress and is not free if you want encryption (then it's about $100/year for the software), but it claims to work with any cloud (Amazon, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox). The main impediment seems to be Amazon's limited API, and like all cloud drive-type storage, a lack of versioning so if your files get clobbered and subsequently synchronized, you've still lost them. But there are ways to avoid that and I'm using it mostly for offline storage (it can create placeholders for migrated files on the local machine so you can see what you had, and recover a specific file by just opening it). Still, there's a learning curve. So I'll probably stick to a combination of Crashplan, Amazon and ODrive until the next thing comes along.

Uwe Baemayr Senior Software Developer Micro Focus