Off site NAS Backup options

Amp34 · 7 Feb 2015 at 16:42

I have a Synology DS414 at home that I store photos and media on. At the moment I have two 2TB portable HDDs that I use to back up the photos and keep them off site (one attached to machine and one off site, the once a month I swap them round). Now my photos folder has gone over 2TB and it doesn't work...

I'm at a bit of a loss now how to back the NAS up. The only affordable way of doing it I can think of is getting a cheap removable caddy system and buying two 4TB drives to alternate. What I can't find at the moment is a caddy system that will allow me to do this.

Is there another option I'm missing? I think online off site backup is just going to be way too expensive for our needs.

GodAtum · 7 Feb 2015 at 17:05

you can get a Startech USB3 or esata caddy, they do single or dual ones.

Caged · 7 Feb 2015 at 18:03

There's a Glacier app that you can add to the Synology boxes:

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

Uhtred · 7 Feb 2015 at 18:22

can you install crashplan to synology? If so that is quite reasonable.

does synology have rsync over ssh? If so, and you have some old pc bits lying around, you can create an offsite backup nas and replicate the changes each night (which is what i used to do)

Amp34 · 7 Feb 2015 at 20:46

Caged said:
There's a Glacier app that you can add to the Synology boxes:

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

Unless I'm mistaken that's not far off £300 a year for 4TB of data... Little rich for me TBH. EDIT: Plus at least another £300 if I actually want to get the data back (over a month or more).

GodAtum said:
you can get a Startech USB3 or esata caddy, they do single or dual ones.

That looks reasonable. That and two WD Green (or cheapest drives available) and a couple of little plastic storage boxes for the HDDs may be the cheapest option.

KIA · 8 Feb 2015 at 12:18

Crashplan will be cheaper.

Rroff · 8 Feb 2015 at 12:30

On my QNAS I've got it setup with a USB drive doing remote replication on the rear (I only use RAID internally for uptime convenience not backup) and setup the front USB copy port so I can "snapshot" the important folders and keep a rotation of offline copies "offsite" on USB discs. Gives me a bit of backup redundancy and a certain level of immunity against those cryptolocker/ransomeware type malwares should it ever happen.

EDIT: Anything I'd not want to lose if I could avoid it comes in under 500GB though which makes that setup a lot easier than if you've got TBs of files.

Amp34 · 8 Feb 2015 at 16:14

KIA said:
Crashplan will be cheaper.

I looked in to that and it appears it's a bit of a fudge to get it working on Synology systems. Mine is also an ARM version which may not be powerful enough or have enough memory to use the fudge that is available. I'm going to look into it in more detail but if I got it if still want an off site full physical backup I think.

Rroff, it's a lot easier with smaller amounts! There are two of us taking photos in our household and the images to back years.

Edited images would probably take up up to 500GB but I'd still want the original files, but that said I may set up one of the portables as another backup for just those (or even use an online service for that. It'll take a bit more work at the organising stage though I guess.