automatic offsite storage with no membership fees?

[netusinfoo]

I would like to purchase 2 backup storage devices, place one at my home and one at a relatives' residence and setup each of them to backup the other.
(offsite storage without the need for physical transfer or 3rd party cloud storage recurring membership)

Are there any products that make this easy to do?

 

[thiggins]

Not the secure, web access part. Many products have scheduled drive-to-drive backup and/or rsync. But you're on your own to set up a secure remote link.

 

[zsole]

You may try the method described in
How To Back Up Offsite for Free with rsync

 

[sims]

bumping this up to ask if this can be done economically today?
the last post in this thread is a few years old.

i did search myself. and i have not found anything which is not too techy.

 

[sims]

i can't see the post but i received this email alert:

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Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************
Is this too techie?
http://pluginbuddy.com/backupbuddy-2-0-now-available/
---

this appears to be a solution for Wordpress not for my home computer and media.

on the other hand, I am looking at Crashplan and trying to figure out if that might be the non-techie solution i need.

 

[thiggins]

Buffalo Cloudstor Reviewed

Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive - Cloud Edition Reviewed
Buddy Backup Review

 

[sims]

Thank you!

I will check out these options.

 

[Dennis Wood]

Any QNAP NAS units would be fine: http://www.qnap.com/pro_application.asp?ap_id=134

The only thing I'd suggest over this guide is using SSH to encrypt backup over the web (it's a checkbox in the backup job configuration). In that case, you'd forward two ports on the routers at each end, SSH, and rsync. You can set each port to whatever you'd like..I wouldn't use the defaults. Been using this for a few years now and it works great. Set up email notifications on failure and you're set. In this scenario you can also back up directly from a windows box to the remote NAS using a windows rsync client like Deltacopy.

 

[thiggins]

The only thing I'd suggest over this guide is using SSH to encrypt backup over the web

How much does this slow your rsyncs, Dennis?

 

[stevech]

On the cheap... you can put a freeware ftp server on each computer (no NAS), setup router to allow ftp ports. Then use Acronis or SecondCopy to backup to a destination FTP server. Whenever both computers are on, the backups go.

 

[Dennis Wood]

Tim, over the LAN the difference with SSH is noticeable. Over the WAN, max upload is 1MB (actually quite good in this area), therefore the speed reduction using SSH is a non-issue. Load balancing on an upstream single pipe like this doesn't work, therefore we can only use one WAN connection at a time.

Thankfully, the sync has worked very reliably, every day for the last 18 months or so. The email notifications (only after share backup failure) have worked 100% too. The only time we've seen failures is self induced...like not forwarding ports correctly etc. I also wasted a day in pfsense because the receiving NAS DNS gateway was set to an incorrect IP. The DNS issue is a sneaky one because it does not affect local NAS access....but it sure messes up outbound WAN traffic from the NAS.

For the record, our READYNAS unit is quite happy rsyncing to QNAP too.

Steve, with the correct port forwarding, rsyncing would work using the free Deltacopy rsync software (no NAS required). The reason I'm such a fan of rsync is that is incredibly efficient in terms of data that is transfered. It only transfers binary differences in changed files...never the entire file (unless it's new). Therefore typical rsync times after say a day of busy email, typical business use etc. are typically 3-5 minutes/workstation. Using SSH, data is also encrypted in transit. Pretty amazing.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks, Dennis. Good point on uplink bandwidth essentially making the SSH performance hit a non-issue.