How are people backing up their NASs?

It was brought to my attention that even though my NAS is set up to be in a RAID configuration…RAID is NOT a backup method. So my next question is how are people backing up their NAS? I have a QNAP NAS TS-473 which has been great. I do LIKE the idea of having a tape cartridge that I can hold in my hand and carry off-site. But I’m interested in looking at all options. Thanks!

Well, it depends on how large your nas is, but, hard drives are today’s tape cartridges. I buy a large enough single hard drive to contain all my NAS information.

Or, use an offsite cloud backup. Again, how useful that is depends on how much data you have and how fast your upload speeds are. Check out iDrive as they offer an option for the initial backup to be to a local drive you send them. There after it is just differential backups.

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What Daniel said.

Buy a cheap external USB HD and back up to that, or do as I do, and backup your primary NAS to an older secondary NAS, or the cloud.

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I know, I have 3 NAS all still in use going back over a decade. Probably will purchase a new one soon. LOL. But, I never suggest that since I doubt most other people have more than 1.

NAS is Synology in their proprietary RAID configuration giving a 1.8TB volume. Back up is to an external 4TB USB hard drive. Our internet connection is too :poop: to use a cloud-based setup.

sucks for them. :wink:

I have local backups in addition to the NAS, but the NAS also backs up offsite to Backblaze B2.

The initial upload took a few days, but once it’s done you’re only incrementally updating.

It’s cheap too - about $10 a month for about 2.5TB of data is my current cost. It varies a little depending on how much you upload/download in any given month.

Local backup to a 4TB USB HDD plus Wasabi S3. BTW, my network attached storage is provided by an Ubuntu Server running ZFS mirror.

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Use DAS (direct attached storage). It is a NAS without the network capability. Plugs into NAS with USB. You could set up, say, 25TB for under $1000. Cheaper if less is needed. Some here use a single hard drive though, so evidently have small storage needs.

My biggest fear is a fire so need stuff backup offsite.

I have a spare Raspberry Pi and I’m looking at ways to use that to backup my NAS to Google Drive.

you have a QNAP NAS (I run Roon on a TS451+ also, looked at the 473 but got a really good offer on the 451+), I schedule a backup from my mirrored internal disks to an external USB drive, and can also use the QNAP SW to backup onto a cloud if I want to.

That I think covers all the bases for what you are asking to achieve doesn’t it ?

I backup my Qnap NAS to Amazon Drive. Happens automatically and works like a charm. I use the 3TB plan for $179 per year. Files are always accessible and speed is good.

My pseudo NAS , ie the 4 drives in my PC I back up to equal sized USB HDD twice !!

I use a program called SyncBack Pro that works by difference so it only copies changes .Takes a few minutes

I back up every time I make any addition or change

Paranoid ? I suppose.

I’m going to be backing up my QNAP TS-473 NAS (my music) to Backblaze B2. (Cloud right?)

Here are step by step directions on how to backup your QNAP NAS to BackBlaze B2

Doesn’t get any easier than this…

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I’m backup up my Synology DS1815+ via iDrive who offer a package running on the NAS which works like a charm and their current pricing for 5TB (which includes 30 versions of files!) is very attractively prices (102 USD for 2 years down from 150 USD normal price).

I’ve heard people complaining about the speed but as I’ve only got 50 Mbps DSL uplink that’s no issue for me. The initial sync of my +1 TB obviously took some time but it worked great.

I successfully backed up my entire NAS music folder last night to Backblaze B2 cloud. Not too bad.
The instructions aren’t perfect that’s for sure. The biggest gotcha was that your “bucket name” has to be unique for the ENTIRE backbaze system not just for your account. I was trying to create a new bucket for my account and it kept giving me an error that that bucket already existed. Another feather for QNAP in their hat as this was really pretty easy to do. I’m definitley not an IT / network guy. Also kuddos to backblaze for having a nice easy setup. Nice experience! Oh it was FREE too. We will see how long that lasts as my music library grows. Or maybe I’m in their Free Trial phase. I’m sure some day soon I’ll get some email looking for a credit card number!!