Hands down, I’m way too late to the party with my backup-strategy, and I have no good explanation.
I have a NAS with OMV on it, and I’m in dire need to create an offsite-backup. I have an old Synology DS215j, which I’d be able to put into my parents home (hundreds of kilometers away).
I didn’t find the energy to research the ways of doing what I want to do. As those are two different systems, the task seems enormous to me, without knowing what to do.
I imagined, that the Synology spins up once a day/once a week, and syncs the data and appdata (two different folder-structures on my NAS), with a certain number of snapshots.
Would you mind helping me a bit, giving me ideas how to set this up? Am I able to prepare this at home, before I bring this to my parents place?
Thank you a ton!
EDIT: Thank you all for your recommendations. I will take the time to read them thoroughly!
As others have mentioned its important to highlight the difference between a sync (basically a replica of the source) vs a true backup which is historical data.
As far as tools goes, if the device is running OMV you might want to start by looking at the options within OMV itself to achieve this. A quick google hinted at a backup plugin that some people seem to be using.
If you’re going to be replicating to a remote NAS over the Internet, try to use a site-to-site VPN for this and do not expose file sharing services to the internet (for example by port forwarding). Its not safe to do so these days.
The questions you need to ask first are:
- What exactly needs to be backed up? Some of it? All of it?
- How much space does the data I need backed up consume? Do I have enough to fit this plus some headroom for retention?
- How many backups do I want to retain? And for how long? (For example you might keep 2 weeks of daily backups, 3 months of weekly backups, 1 year of monthly backups)
- How feasible is it to run a test restore? How often am I going to do so? (I can’t emphasise test restores enough - your backups are useless if they aren’t restorable)
- Do you need/want to encrypt the data at rest?
- Does the internet bandwidth between the two locations allow for you to send all the data for a full backup in a reasonable amount of time or are you best to manually seed the data across somehow?
Once you know that you will be able to determine:
- What tool suits your needs
- How you will configure the tool
- How to set up the interconnects between sites
- How to set up the destination NAS
I hope I haven’t overwhelmed, discouraged or confused you more and feel free to ask as many questions as you need. Protecting your data isn’t fun but it is important and its a good choice you’re making to look into it
Second to this - for what its worth (and I may be tarred and feathered for saying this here), I prefer commercial software for my backups.
I’ve used many, including:
- Acronis
- Arcserve UDP
- Datto
- Storagecraft ShadowProtect
- Unitrends Enterprise Backup (pre-Kaseya, RIP)
- Veeam B&R
- Veritas Backup Exec
What was important to me was:
- Global (not inline) deduplication to disk storage
- Agent-less backup for VMware/Hyper-V
- Tape support with direct granular restore
- Ability to have multiple destinations on a backup job (e.g. disk to disk to tape)
- Encryption
- Easy to set up
- Easy to make changes (GUI)
- Easy to diagnose
- Not having to faff about with it and have it be the one thing in my lab that just works
Believe it or not, I landed on Backup Exec. Veeam was the only other one to even get close. I’ve been using BE for years now and it has never skipped a beat.
This most likely isn’t the solution for you, but I’m mentioning it just so you can get a feel for the sort of considerations I made when deciding how my setup would work.
