Have you done a backup recently?

[austinpop]

I store all my music, photos, videos on my Synology NAS. Backup strategy:

 

1. Local machines (all Macs) backup to the NAS using Time Machine.

 

2. NAS backup to local USB drive using Hyper Backup (nightly)

 

3. NAS backup to remote Synology NAS at a friend's house across town using Hyper Backup (nightly). Initial backup was done locally, and then moved to friend's.

 

I would love to use Amazon, but with my NAS usage pushing 4TB, the initial seed problem is daunting.

 

If you have Synology, I really recommend option 3.

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Computer Audiophile

[austinpop]

I do have a Win -10 machine I'd like to backup to NAS.

 

Any recommendations for backup tools that can be used for a full restore? Acronis True Image?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Computer Audiophile

[austinpop]

What's your nominal ISP upload speed? When I did the initial upload, which at my ISP's then nominal upload speed of a grand 1mbps took 3 months(!), I was happily able to access the Internet and play music over the local network just fine. So if you don't mind leaving the computer/NAS on for a solid block of time, if your experience is like mine you can just let it run in the background.

 

It's 20Mbps.

 

I may be able to limit the traffic to say 15Mbps to allow enough bandwidth on the pipe for existing traffic.

 

Amazon S3 has an initial seed via HDD mail in, but too expensive for this amount of data.

 

Hmm, let me explore it. Thanks!

 

Btw - the only other free remote backup solution with initial seed that I could find was the CrashPlan Friend backup feature. This works on regular Win and Mac machines.

[austinpop]

If your experience is like mine, you will not have to limit your upload speed. I didn't do any limiting with 1Mbps nominal upload (!), and my local network, including audio playback, worked just fine.

 

Edit: Oh, I meant to mention - lots of other people like CrashPlan, and they do many things well. For a variety of reasons (including the fact that they charge quite a bit for the HDD seed, and uploading to them hogged my network), after using CrashPlan for about 6 months I switched to Amazon and have been quite happy.

Update -

1. For backing up my Windows 10 to my NAS, I decided to use Acronis True Image 2017 - for now. I'm familiar with it, so why not. I'm using an incremental backup scheme. I'll let it run for a few weeks and test how well restores work before settling on this for the long term.
   
2. For backing up my Synology NAS to a cloud:
   
   • I'm in no rush, as I already have a remote backup to my NAS at a friend's house in place
     
   • I will give Amazon Drive a shot, as another backup target, next time I go on vacation for a few days, so the initial seed can complete at its own pace
     
   • Some day, we'll get Google fiber or AT&T GigaPower in our neighborhood, with 1Gb up/down. That'll be something!
     

 

Thanks for your suggestions!

[austinpop]

I feel like my "remote backup of NAS to friend" point got lost somewhere along the way!

 

I'm not taking away anything from the backup to Amazon Cloud Drive option, but the initial seed problem is painful. Also, recovery of the entire NAS, if necessary, is also painful.

 

So all I'm saying is if, like me, you're on your 2nd or higher NAS, AND have the old one still kicking around, why not re-purpose it to be your remote backup location? Put it at a friend's house, and make it another backup target.

 

I only know the Synology world, but it's certainly likely something similar is possible on QNAP too. Do the initial backup in your own network. Once at your friend's, assign a static IP to your NAS, and run the EZInternet utility to open up the Hyper Backup port, and set up a DDNS (Synology provides their own DDNS service). Finally, (Quick) connect back to your primary NAS and edit the backup task to change the address of the remote Synology NAS to the DDNS address. You might want to enable transfer encryption too.

 

Easy, peasy. No fuss, no muss.

[austinpop]

You can backup and bring it to work. It can be that simple.

 

It can be, but very rarely is. I would submit that most people fall off the wagon with these manual schemes. I know I do, and I consider myself very organized.

 

No, over the years, after going around the backup block many, many times, the only thing that works reliably is a fully automated backup that you set and forget - BUT, with notifications of success and failure that you monitor. Bonus points for testing integrity and restores periodically.

 

@miguelito - I am a big advocate of off-site backups to a device (NAS) and location (friend, office) you can access. If you're super paranoid, do that AND backup to a cloud too.

 

For me, the constraint is upload speeds, even for the incremental backups. I'm at 20Mbps upload. That limits my backup rate to about 80GB/day. Luckily my daily growth on my NAS is nowhere near that, but some days, if I've bought and ripped a handful of SACDs, I can tie up my uplink for many hours.

[austinpop]

The other thing to be mindful of these days is that not all backup strategies protect you against ransomware. This scourge infects your system and then encrypt files on your computer and all network attached files it can access.

 

How are people dealing with this?

[austinpop]

A year ago, I described an offsite strategy that did not rely on any cloud providers, where your offsite data center is your friend's house. See: https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/28245-have-you-done-a-backup-recently/?do=findComment&comment=613699

 

 

I've been using my strategy for over a year now, and it has worked really well. Granted, I haven't had to restore any data, but I've done periodic tests to convince myself I could, if needed.

 

I use the Synology tools for this, but I believe CrashPlan has a "backup to friend" feature as well. I've never tried that.

 

My upload cap is 20Mb/s, and I average about 100GB/day transfer rate.