Hey guys and hopefully also gals, so I have a Synology NAS with about 3TB of music on it and a WD MyCloud RAID1 hard drive as backup. The WD is (or will be) in my retreat cabin 400 ft away on our property so the data will be safe unless the house gets hit by a Russian nuke (I’m half hour from Los Alamos so distinct possibility soon), but in that case I will be relieved of all my worldly worries.
I was considering a cloud backup service. But to be honest, they seem really expensive. I tried iDrive–piece of crap. Carbonite and Backblaze seem to cost about USD20-30/month which is more than I want to spend. And Azure/Google/AWS even more so.
Considering that I’m concentrating on only buying DSD256 for digital (and vinyl), the storage needs will rise pretty quickly. So expense gets higher.
So what’s a recently-poor-after-buying-too-much-audio-gear to do to have a cloud backup? Thank you.
Enjoy the Music and hoping the Russians or the Chinese or the Aliens don’t launch nukes.
Bad jokes aside, if your goal is to be eco on the wallet, I think make do with what you have is the the best option. When wallet recovers a bit, maybe look into a 2nd Synology with a 10gb network card and expand your home lan with fiber. Sounds expensive but they are really not in terms of audiophile dollars.
My decision was to simply avoid cloud backup and add more My Book external hard drives for backup. I’m a big believer in avoiding NAS unless you’re going to backup a NAS with another NAS. There’s almost as much likelihood of a NAS controller failure as a drive failure. And the controller failure might be unrecoverable. Here’s my solution over the past four years that I’ll continue indefinitely into the future.
I have also found cloud services quite expensive (at least) in case you need to recover the data.
Therefore my approach is one/two big external drives 18TB+, which is most of the time offline (stored physically safely) and synced only ad-hoc. This will save your data in case of any disaster with NAS.
In case you update some things on NAS frequently and need to backup them too, then external USB/eSATA disk with nightly backups is good option. This will save your data from most failures, but is still prone to software errors, lightning strikes and ransomware.
If the capacity of really needed data to backup is more than feasible with extrenal drive, then NAS in another location is option, but in that case i would consider adding volume backup snapshots on remote NAS to have some mitigation against ransom attack or user/software failure
My NAS is meager, 4TB SSD. I have a usb 4TB WD cheap drive plugged into it. It backs it up. I do same with 1tB WD HD into my NUC for backing up roon DB. so far so good. guessing a lightning strike could wipe both. But I did not want to pay for cloud. I should by a few other disk drives and swap them once a year for off site back up.
I personally wouldn’t use cloud services for this, but I’m a bit biased against always incurring monthly charges. Edit: I’m also leery of the very slow restore speeds.
If your NAS has extra capacity for drives, set some more in there and configure them as a volume for backup. Weakness: those backups are exposed to the same environmental risks as the “service” drives.
Personally I’d do an external drive of some sort, with the largest SSD that makes sense. It doesn’t need to be the newest, fastest drive. Even a couple generations old - if they’re still in stock somewhere - would be fine. Download your purchased music in compressed files there, and expand from that to the NAS. Keep the downloaded file as your “backup.”
When you don’t need it for new downloads, put it at your office (assuming you aren’t working from home), or perhaps at a friend’s house. Worst case, buy a waterproof, fireproof “safe” (it’ll be more like a small drawer) and store it in that… outside your house. Even fire-rated safes - particularly small ones - will become quite hot if they’re directly in a fire.
Last (probably silly) suggestion: USB flash drives stored in a fireproof, waterproof safe. Throw them in a bag with an “inventory” of the music on the drive. Download the music files here, expand to your NAS if they’re compressed, put it in storage. 1 TB here for $95: SanDisk 1TB Ultra Dual Drive Luxe USB Type-C Flash Drive - Newegg.com
I just have external drives I connect to the Synology and perform backups at set intervals. I used to have a second Synology for automated backups but migrated away from that.
I really should store the external back up drives at a friend’s house but I haven’t.
I doubt residential symmetrical terabit internet will happen for a very very long time but that would make cloud restore processes more reasonable, aside from subscription fees.
Yes that’s why I was wondering whether having a a backup on the WD NAS in the cabin 400ft away is good enough. If there’s a fire in the house the backup with still be safe.
Although if malware gets in the network then it could affect both the drives since they’re on the same network.
Everything I have on my NAS I also have on my main pc, my lake home PC, and on five external backup drives, two in two states and three only powered up when it is backup time.
I don’t cloud backup as I am am not interested in such things.
Hmmm…, well here’s an alternative thought. Keep only music on your music server drives. Backup those music drives whenever you add new music or you do some serious metadata updating. Otherwise, why backup a drive that has not had any changes?
We’ll all have our respective particular needs that will drive our backup strategies. So, just offering some thoughts.
I think it’s more likely that I’ll actually be more disciplined with a manual incremental backup every month. Then shut it off.
Anything more often to be done manually is more likely to become cumbersome and then won’t do it. Knowing myself… not all of us are disciplined like @aangen !
make sure to check how much you will pay in case you need to download from glacier (including cost of network transfer on AWS side), when i checked it were thousands…
