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Using cloud storage as ulimate backup

9fingers

9fingers

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I've been thinking for a while that my backup provisions are a bit haphazard and whilst loss of most of what I've got stored would be inconvenient, other losses would be a right royal PITA eg document for my business, accounts, HMRC stuff, tenancy agreements, inventories etc etc.

My set up is several PCs running windows networked to all access a Synology NAS box configured as two discrete HDD (not a raid array). When I remember to, one NSA drive get backed up onto the other one.
These NAS drives are getting on a bit although not reporting any problems but sods law says one day they will.

Synology have some software called Cloud Sync (imaginitive name eh?) which claims to talk to most of the common cloud based services.

My question is firstly is anyone here doing something like this with their NAS and secondly is there much to choose between cloud providers. Free services are always attractive although I could justify a small outlay as a legit business expense if there was a compelling advantage. I think I'll only need a few GBytes.

Any thoughts please.

Bob

N.B.
I've got a dropbox account used for odds and ends and would rather keep that separate.
I've bit of an aversion to signing in to microsoft or giving them any network access as I do run a few unlicenced m$ legacy programs.
Strangly and perhaps illogically, I don't mind Google and already have a google drive set up use their email sevices etc etc
 
How comfortable are you with using a gmail account to store these documents? Create an account specifically for this purpose then email from another account.
Is this any less secure than leaving documents with a specialist cloud storage company?
 
Andyp":1gu0lmip said:
How comfortable are you with using a gmail account to store these documents? Create an account specifically for this purpose then email from another account.
Is this any less secure than leaving documents with a specialist cloud storage company?
Click to expand...
That would be one method but I'd really want to use the Synology software to automate the back up.
They do offer Google drive.

Past years documents are fixed but i also have current year documents that I add to a few times a month to ease the burden of end of year collation of transactions.

Bob
 
ScaredyCat":24hupmxl said:
Spideroak One Backup would be my recommendation.
Click to expand...

Thanks Andy,
Not sure if this will work with Synology. They list the following services but it might work with others but possibly with no support from Synology

Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS)
Amazon Drive (end of support as of November 1, 2020)
Amazon S3 compatible cloud services (Amazon S3, hicloud S3 and SFR NAS Backup)
Backblaze B2
Baidu Cloud
Box
Dropbox (including Dropbox for Business. However, Dropbox Team Folder is excluded)
Google Cloud Storage
Google Drive (including G Suite My Drive)
Google Shared Drive
HiDrive
JD Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS)
MegaFon MegaDisk
Microsoft OneDrive (including OneDrive for Business)
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Office365 SharePoint Document Library
OpenStack Swift compatible cloud services (IBM SoftLayer, RackSpace, RackSpace UK)
Tencent Cloud Object Storage (COS)
WebDAV
Yandex Disk

Bob
 
9fingers":1d24eo80 said:
ScaredyCat":1d24eo80 said:
There's a simple solution to that ;) https://spideroak.support/hc/en-us/articles/115002019903-Backing-Up-a-NAS-Device

but also at the bottom there's a couple of links for synology nas users, ymmv but the first option, would just treat it as a device to back up.
Click to expand...

Thanks very much Andy.
I have to make some sawdust right now and then cook dinner but will digest that link this evening with luck.

Bob
Click to expand...


Hopefully the sawdust isn't a requirement for the cooking part of your day..,..
 
I'll second Spideroak. I moved away from it (to Crashplan Pro) as I needed to store a lot more data and Crashplan became most cost effective, but ignoring that consideration Spideroak is an excellent choice.

I also use Google Drive for stuff on my local PC (and I use insync to synchronise it to a server which is backed up on Crashplan), but I would be wary about using Google Drive synchronisation on your NAS. Operating systems on NAS devices are notorious for not being updated with security patches. If your NAS is set up to have access to your Google Account and it gets compromised, there is a risk (albeit a relatively small one) that your Gmail could get compromised and that's the perfect invitation for ID theft.

I'll admit that this is verging on the paranoid, but it's amazing how much can be hacked if someone has access to your email account, so keeping it separate to things like a NAS seems a sensible precaution.

Oh, and if you haven't already done so, turn on two-factor authentication on your gmail account (and anywhere else you can).

If you decide to stick with one of the ones on the supported list (and hence don't use Spideroak), then considering the relatively small amounts of data you want to back up (which sounds likely to be in the free tier for a lot of services), I'd pick based on likelihood of long-term availability. Google is probably best (ignoring all the security concerns above, which could be overcome by creating a separate account for backup vs email), Dropbox next.
 
Seems I've hit a small issue. My NAS is old and will only take up to a certain operating system (DSM ver 4.2) and that does not support Cloud Sync but instead supports a few apps each aimed at a specific provider
e.g. Amazon, Strato, IDrive and a couple of others.
I'm now looking at the possibility of mounting the two drives in the NAS on one of the PCs and from there sync with something like Google Drive. 15GB free which will be more than enough.

Bob
 
With such a small amount of data and slowly changing files I can't see why you are looking at such a solution. If it is just a few GB why not back up to a memory stick or 3 and store them somewhere safe. Just rotate them when you think there is more to be saved.

Is the stuff on the NAS copies of what is on a PC or the only instance of these items? dangerous if the latter.

There must be emails and probably other stuff like links to web sites, stuff you forgot was on there etc. that means you should be backing up the PC's too.

I have all our computers backed up to a server box running Freenas. I then have 2 large plug in drives that have copies of everything on freenas and rotate them to my daughters place so a copy is off site that is reasonably up to date. Not considered cloud services purely down to the amount of data involved.
 
I do use cloud services, along with a (quite old) 6 slot Fujitsu RAID array and a couple of other backup drives (large number of photos takes up lots of space) and I separate photo backups (Raw) from documents etc, plus I sync some things across three machines.

However, I do find cloud backup and sync annoying at times. It is very slow compared with hard wired SSD and were it not for the sync convenience it offers, I would probably ditch it and do all backups locally.

I complicate matters by separating my iCloud (Apple) stuff from MS backups (365 subscription and their cloud service). I moved away from Dropbox as I don't like the functionality.

I find 1Tb SSD drives super convenient for shifting things like photo projects around. These are pretty cheap now and I was just running 1 laptop I would probably do all of my backups on a couple of miniature SSD drives. This is what we do with my wife's private laptop.

I used to use spideroak several years ago, but moved away from it as it was unreliable at the time. May well be much better now.

When I had the financial services company we needed ultra reliable fast recovery and used Datto for that. It's excellent but too expensive for home use.
 
Robert":29fwg13n said:
With such a small amount of data and slowly changing files I can't see why you are looking at such a solution. If it is just a few GB why not back up to a memory stick or 3 and store them somewhere safe. Just rotate them when you think there is more to be saved.

Is the stuff on the NAS copies of what is on a PC or the only instance of these items? dangerous if the latter.

There must be emails and probably other stuff like links to web sites, stuff you forgot was on there etc. that means you should be backing up the PC's too.

I have all our computers backed up to a server box running Freenas. I then have 2 large plug in drives that have copies of everything on freenas and rotate them to my daughters place so a copy is off site that is reasonably up to date. Not considered cloud services purely down to the amount of data involved.
Click to expand...

Currently my backups between NAS drives are manual when I remember to do it and in between times there are single instances of files on one of the NAS drives alone which is a concern hence wanting to do something about it and for it to be automated.
Adrians suggestion of using an SSD drive or yours of a memory stick provided it's automated is a possibility.
I need to decide on the probability of an issue with that hardware Vs using google drive say.
There is also the possibility of loss due to fire etc which would be avoided with google drive.

Emails are left on the server so should be recoverable but you are correct that is a potential weakness.

Bob
 
Oddly enough I used the Sandisk 1Tb SSD just now to copy a bunch of photos off a laptop onto my main iMac for editing and website. I do this with photos because it takes literally 3 or 4 seconds to do multiple Gb and is way faster than cloud sync. While I am at it copy the same folder to two back up drives connected to the iMac. One of these syncs with the RAID and the other syncs with the iCloud (in due course).

Before I got rid of my last business we had 70 workstations, plus servers etc and backup was a big deal. I outsourced the Datto set up etc to an IT company who also serviced our server room etc. The lesson I learnt over the years is that hard drives can and do fail. They may give no warning and it is always inconvenient. SSD drives seem to be much more reliable (and obviously have far more capacity) than memory sticks, and a 1Tb or a 2Tb drive is the size of a credit card. For me they were an essential business expense...

My business partner (female and lovely in all respects) is truly hopeless at doing backups. She has her laptop with her everywhere she goes and I badgered her into carrying an SSD in her handbag and copying her new folders often enough to prevent disaster. (She had a disaster a couple of years ago so she listens to me now instead of just pretending to).

PS. Tried to upload photo - I hate the photo system own the forum! Perfectly ordinary jpeg and forum software says it cannot compute the size (which is not too big).
 
AJB Temple":2t0ej5to said:
My business partner (female and lovely in all respects) is truly hopeless at doing backups. She has her laptop with her everywhere she goes and I badgered her into carrying an SSD in her handbag and copying her new folders often enough to prevent disaster. (She had a disaster a couple of years ago so she listens to me now instead of just pretending to).
Click to expand...

This is the one reason I like Cloud Sync as a backup option: it's completely automatic. I cannot trust myself to manually back stuff up. If I have to do anything manual, it won't happen (at least not often enough).

My (Windows) laptop runs insync (which backs up to Google Drive) and everything I'm working on is on there. Everything else (along with a copy of the google drive stuff, although I'm sure Google's backup regime is better than mine!) lives on the (Linux) media server upstairs. That's all on a mixture of RAID hard drives (for the big stuff) and RAID SSDs (for smaller but arguably more important stuff). The server is automatically backed up to Crashplan (currently 4.2 TB of data backed up), but if one of the 4 hard drives or one of the 4 SSDs fail, I swap it out for a new one and the RAID array sorts everything out within a day or so (with no data loss). The server is always on and I probably have to replace a hard disk or SSD every 5 years or so at a guess. When the SSD with the operating system on fails, that'll be a bit more of a pain as it isn't in a RAID array, but there's no important data that will be lost, it'll just use some of my time in reinstalling an operating system.

Crashplan's there in case of something more serious (like a fire taking out the whole PC!). Offsite backup of some sort is a very good idea. Crashplan isn't the cheapest option out there, but it's good if you want to store several terabytes of data.

The problem with the above set up (apart from the Insync / Google Drive thing on my laptop) is that you've got to know what you're doing to be able to set it up: it's far from simple. For relatively small amounts of personal data stored only on user computers (as opposed to servers or NAS drives), it's hard to beat Insync & Google Drive for simplicity and reliability in my opinion (as long as you store your files in the folder you've chosen to synchronise with Insync).

I must admit to being quite paranoid about this sort of thing. Many years ago when I was doing my PhD, I was about a month from finishing and my laptop's hard drive failed. I'd backed it up about 2 weeks previously, but in the last phases of my PhD I was producing a lot of new data fast and 2 weeks' worth of data was a lot of work. Thankfully I found a company that was able to recover the data from the hard drive (and they even gave me a student discount!), but ever since then I've been very wary of manual backups.
 
Synology and cloud backup to google drive is perfectly acceptable, it's not something you need to overthink. Thats what I use and never had any issue.

Cheers
 
Craig Salisbury":3gnw5lr2 said:
Synology and cloud backup to google drive is perfectly acceptable, it's not something you need to overthink. Thats what I use and never had any issue.

Cheers
Click to expand...
I’ve just had it confirmed that my synology NAS will not support the cloud sync package. In needs DSM 6 or above. I can only run up to DSM 4.2 on my ds209

Craig. Are you using cloud sync or some other package on your synology NAS? If so what works for you please.

Bob
 
Hi,

I am running cloudsync on a synology DS415+ and DSM 6.2.3.

A cheap solution could be done with a raspberry Pi, you could install a google drive backup application on it, mount the synology and problem resolved :)

Cheers
Craig
 
I've now got something working for my critical backup using Aomei software and google drive and its been behaving for a few days now.
My thoughts have turned to creating local backups for personal stuff of a less critical but useful precaution type level.
I've been looking at 1-2TB USB SSD. All the big names come with price tags of £200 ish plus or minus but ebay is full of offerings in the £40-60 bracket and I'm wondering what the difference might be.
Most of the comparisons of branded models are about speed but for my backups these will run overnight and in most cases will be limited by my wifi speed and using USB2 interface so speed is not an important parameter
Has any one dabbled with the cheapies? with so many around one ebay etc they can't all be carp otherwise google searches would throw up the issues but why are they so cheap I keep asking myself?

Here is an example: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USB-3-1-Exte ... 4091407070

It would be so much easier if I was not a tight-wad :lol:

Bob
 
That ebay one will be a fake. It may have 2TB but probably a laptop drive. If it is a SSD then it will be a small one with the software faked to read higher.

Don't see why you are looking at SSD for backup. Just get a plug in drive or better still get two so you can put one somewhere safe and use the other for day to day and swap them over sometime.

2TB USB powered around £39 on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BYNCTOW?th=1

That will have a laptop drive inside (review says Toshiba). Or get a mains powered plug in drive with a standard 3.5 inside.
 
Robert":w9zy1msc said:
That ebay one will be a fake. It may have 2TB but probably a laptop drive. If it is a SSD then it will be a small one with the software faked to read higher.

Don't see why you are looking at SSD for backup. Just get a plug in drive or better still get two so you can put one somewhere safe and use the other for day to day and swap them over sometime.

2TB USB powered around £39 on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BYNCTOW?th=1

That will have a laptop drive inside (review says Toshiba). Or get a mains powered plug in drive with a standard 3.5 inside.
Click to expand...

There had to be a catch. My only thought behind SSD was no moving parts and hence should be longer life.
I'd not realised mechanical drives could be so cheap. A pair makes sense, I could keep one in the workshop being at the bottom of the garden and not likely to burn to the ground at the same time as the house.

Bob
 
By the sound of it they lost 2.

We all now though that we need backups in multiple places and that we should not install a system that overwrites the backups when they corrupt. I don't think (in financial services) I have ever dealt with a commercial cloud recovery firm that does not run at least parallel and geographically dispersed data centres.

It's interesting though that it so badly affected utilities like Rocket (which we used very briefly until I put a stop to it), suggesting their failover was not as good as it should have been.
 
AJB Temple":17mgwj4s said:
It's interesting though that it so badly affected utilities like Rocket (which we used very briefly until I put a stop to it), suggesting their failover was not as good as it should have been.
Click to expand...

Things like this are where you really see the difference in the various stages of cloud computing adoption. Companies that have decided to do things "in the cloud" but still think in terms of machines and servers will often just move their existing applications, designed for physical hosting, onto cloud-hosted virtual machines. They're now in the cloud, on someone else's computer, but all the running state of those applications is still tied to a single virtualisation host somewhere. Yes, if it goes down, you can start it up again in another datacentre almost immediately, but that's still equivalent to hard-resetting your physical servers all at once and wiping all transient state. If your application isn't designed to handle that, it can disrupt operations for a long time after everything is supposedly back online.

A cloud-native architecture uses what the cloud vendors like to call 'serverless' computing. It isn't, of course - there are still an awful lot of servers involved - but what it is is stateless, with each request able to run on a completely different server. In that design, a server or datacentre going offline suddenly won't even be noticed, as constantly moving between physical hosts is part of normal running.
 
Craig Salisbury":27alofjk said:
Have you sorted it yet Bob ? seems to be an awful lot of tangents in the thread. and i dont want to pull out the big guns just yet :)
Click to expand...
Not fully Craig. I’m experimenting with various options but not settled yet.
I’ve a better mental model of what I want to achieve for a wider backup of files which is a start and going to phone a mate to chat it through with.
Bob
 
You certainly have plenty of options at different price points, depending on the level of complexity you want to involve, it doesn't need to be over engineered mind. I seem to spend my days telling "solution architects" to reign themselves in for this reason.

Happy to go over some options as its probably the one area I have an actual decent amount of knowledge because of my day job :)
 
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