[lug] (Small) Network backup recommendations

[Jed S. Baer]

On Mon, 24 May 2021 09:15:43 -0600
Mike Witt wrote:

> > 4-bay Synology NAS  
> 
> Am I reading the spec correctly that this is a bit over $500 without  
> any actual disks?
> Maybe the 2 bay version could be the type of thing I'm looking for.
> 
> Have you actually used this device? Everything I look at has a number  
> of reviews from people unable to get it to work very well. And there's  
> always the question of whether it's sort of expecting to work only with  
> Windows.

Some years back, I installed one of these where I worked. Didn't have any
troubles, though there was one issue with the SW undoing the blank password
for public shares every time I updated the OS. It uses CIFS, so any machine
that can do that should work with it, so Samba on Linux ought to be fine. I
will mention that I recently have failed to get Samba to talk to a Win7
box, and I don't know which changes caused that - both the Linx machine and
Win7 machine had updates, and I hadn't used Samba in a few years. Seemed to
be an authentication issue, but I didn't get further into it than that.

Last I knew, the Synology NAS boxen ran a custom Linux. But all config is
done via a web interface. I think you could drop to command line. Lots of
utilities available for it, including private cloud of some sort.

Other brands of those things are out there, and I figure they're fairly
similar. Years back, a friend was quite pleased with his Thecus, but I
think they're even more pricey than Synology.

The trade-off with a 2-bay NAS is you can get a mirror, but not RAID-[5...]
so if you want some level of RAID, you'll spend more for the same
effective storage with a 2-bay. (Assuming a constant $/TB value, which
doesn't actually exist - I know.)

In the aforementioned config, I ran SyncBackFree on the Win boxen - same
kind of function as rsync. With a SMB mount target, you should be able to
run rdiff-backup or tar in cron, or whatever on Linux.

However, maybe a 6TB in an external USB3 caddy on one of your existing
boxes, which would then become the NAS, would work fine. If you have a
Linux box up 24/7 then scheduled backups should be easy from the other
machines. (With caveats as noted above, but I'm sure there's a fix for the
Samba connect issue).

And, as noted by others, your solution will be colored by your concerns
about malware jumping through your network.

My big preference is something that's up 24/7, so I can have my backup
automated, and not rely on my remembering to do something. :)

-- 
All operating systems suck, but Linux just sucks less
 - Linus Torvalds