Hi all. Like many folks here, I run a NAS to avoid having all my personal data (and my family’s data) in the cloud. However, if you want to prepare for disaster, not just dead hardware, but the house burning down, you want an offsite backup.
Any solution that requires me or another person physically attaching external drives is doomed to fail.
Where do you backup your data? I’ve used Backblaze B2 and Wasabi for business backups, but for personal data, it starts to get pricey if you have 5-6 TB. What have you used, or where do you stick/upload your homelab NAS backups?
BTW, in my case, I’m running TruseNAS scale, with a few media shares for music and movies, and I have it running an Immich server for photos.
I use Google Drive (encrypted at rest) for critical data only (financial, legal, medical) to stay below the 5GB free tier. An alternative to paid cloud storage is to set up set up a NAS at a trusted relative’s home and enable a Tailscale MESH VPN (never expose a NAS to the public internet) between the two locations and backup between the two. Perform the initial sync on a local network, then deploy at the remotely location. This assumes both locations have sufficient bandwidth, will not incur throttling, exceed limits, or overage charges.
I know this is the common interpretation of 3-2-1, but I implement it a bit differently. I don’t count my original data set as a copy. I keep a local copy and then two offsite copies at different providers. So I have 4 total copies of my data. And actually in my setup, I kind of have two local copies of my data. I back up my Synology locally to an Openmediavault machine that I built. But I keep two copies of the Synology. One is a “multiversion” copy so I can have version control, etc. And the other is a “single version” backup so I can actually access my data on the Openmediavault machine directly without restoring it. Its a little easier for me since my data all fits into a 1TB drive. I don’t have a media server or other large libraries of data.
I also follow a 3-2-1 backup strategy. My main NAS is a Synolgoy, then I have a TrueNAS Frankenstein box I backup the Synology to locally. And the Offsite backup to IDrive S3 block storage for things that don’t change often and Synology C2 for things that do change rapidly.
Thanks for the insights thus far. I’m lazy, and cheap, but it does seem as if the best long term value would be to get a 2 bay NAS I can store w/ a relative, use tailscale, and store backups there.
For additional cloud backup, if I pare down to the family photos, some important document folders and my music collection, I could get away with a 1TB backup in a cloud bucket which is financially easy to swing.
I believe the Hetzner Storage Box could be a great option for you. $13 a month for 5TB or $24 a month for 10TB seems to be the lowest cost per TB in that context.
It is a shame that more NAS solutions don’t offer ways to mount external hard disks and ‘foreign’ SMB/NFS mounts.
It’s as if they expect their device to exist in isolation. The UNAS series offers cloud backup, but not really USB/portable. You can mount SMB shares. TrueNAS seems to make this difficult for the heck of it. I’ve no experience of Synology or QNAP (or others) but i’s an area they all need to work on to make easier, simpler and more flexible - it shouldn’t be ‘transparent’, but actually show the data transfer/errors.
Apologies, no use to the thread, just a rant about something pretty vital.
You might be shocked at all the backup mechanisms that Synology offers natively. Active backup works with Rsync, WebDAV, and Openstack Swift, all the major cloud providers (Google, Drop box, etc), any S3 provider as well as a locally attached USB volume. In addition they offer utilities to back up to Glacier, Sync (as opposed to backup) your files to any cloud provider, and to back up to other Synology NAS devices. I use Rsync to back up to Openmediavault as well as to TrueNAS
I went w/ the iDrive e2 2TB plan. $99/year for 2TB suits my backup needs, and a promo so only $50 for the 1st year. I’ll eventually setup my sister with a NAS and we can do cross buddy backups, but the iDrive fits my budget and storage needs for now. Thanks all.