Backing up to an offsite NAS

Y15HAL

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Good Morning All,

I am looking for a solution to back up all of my data offsite easily....

At the moment, I have all of my data on a Synology NAS at home, with a backup on an external Hard Drive.

I also store an external drive offsite, and from time-to-time copy all the data over to the offsite one so it is up to date....

I've been looking at cloud storage which would make my life easier, but comes at a monthly cost....

I was just thinking I could get something like a WD My Cloud and have this offsite, and copy data to it remotely....?

Can anyone foresee any issues with this solution? Would it be viable to copy over large chunks of data remotely like this?

Any help/info much appreciated.

Thanks

Vishal
 
How much data? Home broadband up speed is pretty poor so I can see that as a problem.
How about having a small fire safe at home for the hard drive?
 
I'd kinda like to do the same - hard drive space is cheap, but upload speeds for domestic use don't quite cut it. Of course, it depends what ISP you're with, but in my case I get around 1-2mb upstream, so it'd take an age to do the relatively small 2TB of data of back up. It's amazing that on 4G I see 20+mb upstream, but my dedicated DSL line gives only a fraction of that! A quicker cheaper method would be a large USB drive, but you'd need to bring it to the data, or take the data to it, to make the back up, and then separate them again - not ideal...
 
Domestic ISP services are deliberately Asynchronous (the "A" in ADSL) and offer better download than upload rates because most people download a lot more than upload. Business oriented services services usually offer similar upload and download rates, but they do cost more.

One way to do this would be to use some system that does incremental backups. So you bring the kit into one location to create the "seed" (or "base") replica thence in subsequent iteration you only send the changes - sometimes these are called "delta" images - which is usually much less data. There are various technologies that can do this. A file system called ZFS, which some of the turnkey NAS solutions are based on, has this capability built in.

Be wary of things that talk about "snapshots" - snapshots are not backups in and of themselves, but they can be used to create backups (you take the snapshot which grabs a point in time image of the file system, then back off the snapshot somewhere else.)

Also, when considering the cost of this, don't forget the that data you ship across the Internet is going to "count" against any capping and charging at the receiving end. With and incremental backup scheme, this may not be a lot, but it's worth considering when determining whether a service based cloud store is "expensive" or not.

If you wanted to be really thourough, you'd test restoring the data to ensure you can do so. It's amazing how often, even in the IT business, people set up backup regimes, but never ever test them.
 
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One thing about incremental backups - you need to do a full backup every so often or any damage to the remote system will leave your data unrecoverable.
 
I backup about 1tb to the cloud. Takes a while initially by then it's just small updates. Use elephantdrive which integrates into my nas. Have been looking at switching as they have some foibles. Amazon S3 glacier storage is pretty cheap, and there is 'free' community-supplied Symform which I'm trying.

I do a full recover and use Beyond Compare to validate every now and again.

I use it for our documents, photos, videos and the ripped music collection. No movies.
 
A very good point about validation.
 
All good points above......

Initially it would be around 1TB of data going into the drive, but this can be done locally. Once the drive is offsite, I'm only talking a few GB of data at a time. These are mainly photography related, so sometimes can be 4GB, other times can be like 32GB.

I usually get an upload speed of 10meg......
 
Any more before I take the plunge?
 

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