Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

Recently got a Synology and have been considering cloud backup needs. Mine would roughly be a terabyte, and so far my thinking is shaking out as:

For incrementally backing up laptop data, the process needs to run on my laptop anyway, so I may as well just use Arq.

For NAS data that changes frequently enough to desire incrementals, choose Synology Hyperbackup.

For NAS data that doesn't change frequently and can just be sync'd, choose Synology Cloud Sync.

For NAS data that you don't need locally and only need to archive, choose Synology Cloud Sync with one-way-sync. (Less hassle than AWS Glacier.)

As for the cloud provider itself, I'm think I'll probably go with Wasabi, at $6/TB. I heard that Backblaze occasionally has weird gotchas that surprise people, like auto-deleting files from your backups that you delete locally, so I just feel cautious.

Main things giving me pause: minimum block size on Wasabi (I'm sure some of my files are smaller; don't know what sticker shock I'll experience), and unsure why I should consider a command line tool like restic instead of the above.

So many options… and the data is likely very precious so it is worth the time to review and test what you can.

I tried several different configurations and finally landed on the following.

I have a Synology that I have been running for a couple years now.

- RAID 0 w 2 14TB drives, 400GB is highly critical

The 400GB of highly critical is further backed up:

- external 1 TB SSD that lives at my sisters house and is updated monthly or so using Sync w encrypted EXT4 formatting

- B2 sync with 1 way, encrypted backup and nightly updates (using Backblaze’s encryption because Synology requires your device and if that goes… you are sol)

I friggin love it. I have restored things several times to test the process and it just works.

It only costs me $2/ mo for Backblaze B2 with that amount of data. Well worth it.

Good luck

Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

> I heard that Backblaze occasionally has weird gotchas that surprise people, like auto-deleting files from your backups that you delete locally, so I just feel cautious.

We have two similar products, and it's easy to mix them up. To clarify:

Backblaze Computer Backup (a different product from Backblaze B2) deletes old versions of files from your backup either 30 days or 1 year (you choose which) after you delete them locally. You also have the option to enable "Forever Version History", which costs $6/TB per month once your files age out of the backup.

Backblaze B2 (S3-compatible cloud object storage) will never delete anything unless you tell it to do so, either via the API or a lifecycle rule.

Thanks for clarifying that, that does help. I did start Wasabi's 30-day trial yesterday but will reconsider B2 depending on how that goes.

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