Hands down, I’m way too late to the party with my backup-strategy, and I have no good explanation.

I have a NAS with OMV on it, and I’m in dire need to create an offsite-backup. I have an old Synology DS215j, which I’d be able to put into my parents home (hundreds of kilometers away).

I didn’t find the energy to research the ways of doing what I want to do. As those are two different systems, the task seems enormous to me, without knowing what to do.

I imagined, that the Synology spins up once a day/once a week, and syncs the data and appdata (two different folder-structures on my NAS), with a certain number of snapshots.

Would you mind helping me a bit, giving me ideas how to set this up? Am I able to prepare this at home, before I bring this to my parents place?

Thank you a ton!

EDIT: Thank you all for your recommendations. I will take the time to read them thoroughly!

  • hydrogen@lemmy.mlEnglish
    17·
    4 months ago

    There are a lot of different methodes you could try. I think the easiest is to connect both systems with a (mesh)VPN like Wireguard, ZeroTier or Tailscale. Then you can simply copy stuff over using rsync -a (archive mode) with a cronjob or using special tools like Borg backup, kopia, etc

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      I second this. But keep in mind the difference between a sync tool like rsync, syncthing etc. and a dedicated backup tool like borg.

      A sync tool is basically a fancy copy. It copies what is there now. It’s a bit smarter than a copy in that it can avoid copying unmodified files, can optionally delete files that are no longer there, and has include/exclude patterns.

      But a sync tool doesn’t preserve older versions, and doesn’t do deduplication, compression, encryption and so on. A backup tool does.

      Both can be useful, as long as you use them properly. For example I gave my dad a Syncthing dir on his laptop that syncs whatever happens in that dir, over Tailscale, to my NAS. But the dir on the NAS gets backed up with Borg once a day.

      The Syncthing protects against problems like the laptop dies, gets dropped, gets stolen etc. The Borg backup protects against deleted and modified files. Neither of them is of any use if the user didn’t put something in the dir to begin with.