Off Site - NAS Backup

[QuickThinking]

I'm finally taking a comprehensive look at backup. My usual MO is something involving big external USB drives and the occasional hit or miss DVD backing up something critical. What I am working on now is building or buying and modding a feature rich NAS at home to get the type of backups and restore features I want. The moment I do that, I run into another concern, how do I backup my NAS?

Hardware RAID doesn't help me with fire, flood, tornado, or theft. I have a friend who built a NAS into a ventilated previously fire-proof safe bolted to the cement floor in his garage... I'm not going there!

I already posted some of my concerns in relation to an article Backing Up Your NAS: Harder Than It Should Be by Tim Higgins. You can find my post in the forums here.

Assuming I only put my music, personal photos, and videos on my home NAS that would still be over 100GBs of data. I need a way to make an off site copy of my NAS's data without breaking my ISP's EULA (which transfering 100GBs of data would surely do). Even if I was able to find a way around this by scheduling the job over weeks or months, what good would it do me when my NAS fails and I need to download same said data, none that's what.

So what I plan on doing. Build or buy and mod a second NAS / file server / freeNAS whatever and synchronize them locally. Then move the second device over to my friends house who has a high speed cable internet connection like mine and configure them so that any changes from that point on get mirrored over to the device at my friends house. To me, this seems like the only reasonably priced way to do an off site backup for personal use. A secondary feature, if I can get it, would be to encrypt my off site backup because who knows how curious my friend would turn out to be.

Anyways, considering I haven't built either device yet and I can do it right from the get go, what would you guys recommend? Take into account, I'm a highly technical Windows guy. I'm not scared of linux or tutorials but I am concerned that if the solution is too difficult to set up, then the likelihood of successfully restoring from a complicated solution goes way down and that defeats the purpose.

I'm considering everything from FreeNAS, BackupPC, rdiff-backup, identical commercial NASs modded to use rsync, over priced Drobos with Drobo Shares, etc.. it's all on the table. But I'd like the solution to come in at under 1k, and I should point out I have easy access to a few older PC's that could potentially be used as part of the solution.

There must be someone out there thats figured out a way to do a cost effective off site backup for personal use. Help a guy out!

 

[LMS]

I've been trying to find the right nas solution via this (fantastic) site for months, and everything I find seems to hit a brick wall when it comes to backups. I know lots of NAS devices will allow you to back up to another nas device (often of the same vendor), but buying two nas devices seems crazy. I don't want to rsynch. Again, second box. As far as online backup services, besides the bandwidth issues, I just don't trust them to keep my data private.

I don't care about recovering deleted files. I'm strictly looking for disaster recovery of my data.

So what I've resigned myself to doing is build my own file server, with a front loadable removable drive bay. I'll get internal 1tb drives and a couple 1tb drives that I can load from the front panel. I'll do nightly backups to the removable drive, bring it to work on Monday and lock it in a drawer, and bring the one there home and load it up. Repeat every week, or whatever frequency you want. It will be more money than I originally wanted to spend, but I can load any OS and backup software I want, and make my own choices about how I want my mixed Windows & Mac network to be serviced.

It just amazes me that the vendors haven't picked up on this need for the lower end NAS products. I was a pretty eager customer a few months ago. Now, I don't pay attention to what they're selling anymore.

Larry

 

[QuickThinking]

LMS:

I agree your solution is a much simpler one than what I am potentially looking at. However, knowing my personality as well as I do, and nobody knows it better than me,.. I guarantee you that I would slack off after a few weeks of that kind of routine. That, or my life, my wife, my dogs, my inlaws... you name it would rear up and throw me a curveball and I would end up forgetting.​

The solution I'm hoping to find puts the grunt work at the beginning, then drops back to occasionally reviewing logs, occasionaly testing my ability to restore a file, and otherwise letting it do it's thing. I am concerned about getting the system to grow with me, but assuming I have about 100GB of data that I really want to back up, I'll probably build something that can handle about 500GB and then grow into that for a while.

 

[thiggins]

LMS: Why is using a second NAS crazy? You can get single drive 1 TB NASes now with decent performance for relatively little money. How much storage do you need?

Rolling your own server will get you more flexibility. But it won't necessarily be cheaper.

 

[Corbu]

Why nobody is mentioning Online Storage? It is fire, flood, theft proof and you don’t need to backup everything, only important stuff. Prices are dropping fast and will drop even further in the future. A regular NAS + online backup / storage seems the perfect combination to me.

 

[yejun]

It costs $1800 per TB per year on amazon.

 

[Corbu]

It is too much; there are better alternatives out there. The one that I consider subscribing is 4.95/month for 100GB or 10$/ 500 GB if I need over 100 GB . As a comparison 1TB with them is 240$/year so the Amazon offer is just a plain rip off for people who are afraid of a Google search. This is just an example, prices will only go down in the future; for me online backup is the main alternative to NAS backup, but it all depends on how much space you need.

 

[yejun]

Rsync alone can't do incremental backup. If you delete a file by mistake before sync, it will be deleted on backup as well.
And it can not backup open file like database.