May 14th, 2024
Situation:
I’ve been running my Synology with a remote backup for a couple of years. I love the Synology NAS and their cloud backup solution. I’m using Synology’s Hyper Backup pushing my data to the Synology’s S2 cloud. I also have local snapshots turned on, but no local backup on a separate media. None, nada, zilch. Oops.
Standard Backup Strategy
A 3, 2, 1 backup strategy is the primary data, a local copy on different media, and one copy offsite. I only have my 1 onsite and my 1 cloud backup so I’m shy one local copy. Yes, I have RAID 1, but RAID is not a backup.
Now that I have realized my error, how do I do a local backup?
Criteria:
- I want a backup with the most critical data backed up and available to my computers, Mac and Linux. The backup will contain home videos, photos, financial documents, etc. I’d like to take a snapshot after every backup as well.
- I also want a Hyper Backup with snap shots, versioning etc. of the data I’m sending to the cloud, everything but my time machine backups for my Macs.
Budget:
Big enough to meet my minimum requirements listed above, but not more. $200 – $300 was my thought. The ultimate would be a second Synology NAS to hold Hyper Backups with snapshots AND have the critical data easily accessible, but that is a bit out of my price range. My original thought was an 8 terabyte WD Black external USB on sale at Best Buy for $189, so that is the bottom end of what I will spend.
My Solution:
Rsync of Data so I can Access It Directly
For a backup of the system: I’m doing a USB copy backup to an old 3 TB USB drive for a convenient backup of my most critical information. This allows an air gap to protect from Viruses and ransomware, but also the ability to read the files while I’m restoring from another local solution or my cloud hyper backup. I plug it in on Fridays after work and unplug it Sunday morning so backups can happen on the weekend and it is air gapped 6 out of 7 days. I believe and agree with everything I just wrote. My issue is currently can’t get the USB drive connected directly to run at sustained rate higher than 3 – 5 mbps. More on that in my post on backing up a Synology NAS up to a UBS 3.0 drive.
I’m moving to another option – Rsync to a Raspberry Pi with Open Media Vault – a single drive NAS. More details on that solution below. I don’t get the air gap, but it gets me an easily accessible copy of my data.
Local Hyper Backup
For my second local solution I want a full Hyper Backup of all my data. I’m going with another homemade Raspberry Pi Open Media Vault NAS with a single drive to hold the Hyper Backup. It will also provide me with one more benefit, more on that later on.
Building the Raspberry Pi NAS Devices
For the homemade NAS devices I went with 2 raspberry pi 4 2 gb and Seagate Iron Wolf 8 tb drives. I have each hard drive in their own external enclosures hooked up through USB 3.0 to the Raspberry Pi in a rack. I put Open Media Vault on the Raspberry pi so I can easily do configuration and share via SMB, NFS and rsync. This makes two relatively cheap but effective NASes with reasonable protection.
The Seagate Iron Wolf drives are $174 a drive and $20 for the enclosures, so $400, I already own the Pies. This puts me a little more than twice a single consumer grade drive, but with twice the protection with two copies. I went with the Iron Wolf drives because they are on Synology’s compatibility list. When I can afford to buy a diskless Synology device, I already have the drives (or some of them if I go for a 4-bay) for my second Synology NAS.
Also went one step further. Rather than using the EX4 file system, I am using Open Media Vaults enriched BTRFS support on the Rsync backup. This allows me to implement snapshots of my NAS for the backup I can access. Yet a little more protection and some versioning.
Conclusion
In the end I went for what I think is a solid solution that meets my needs. 1. A readily available backup of my most precious information. 2. A solid onsite back up solution for that data and everything else, with an upgrade path to another Synology NAS for a full local backup solution.
References
This article has a nice overview of all options, and a good grid of what equipment goes with which backup solution. There are supporting documents with instructions for each of the available options.
https://kb.synology.com/en-my/DSM/tutorial/How_to_back_up_your_Synology_NAS
Thanks to Space Rex and his walkthrough of the backup options for Synology Products:
All Synology Backup Methods Explained and Which One is Right For You?