Backup Storage Revisited

Software
1

Hello all,

I have to re-evaluate my backup workflow. After upgrading to Mojave, for some reason Time Machine and my Synology don’t connect properly as they should. There’s always some issue going on that forces me to cancel or redo it again.

In addition, one of drives from my secondary and tertiary copies have stopped working completely. So what’s the best thing to do? Go into defcon 5, red alert mode, and find a new way to back (or see if anything new has changed this past 2018, and if anyone has new thoughts for 2019)

Previous Backup Workflow

  1. Every file, project, etc goes on to my Synology, organized and categorized - Time machine backups would also get into this process (copy 1)
  2. Synology gets copied to the Cloud via Crashplan Business (copy 2)
  3. Portable externals that I manually swap to Synology for select folders (copy 3)

Proposed Solution…

  1. Still send all files to Synology, (copy 1)

1a. Not sure how to handle Time Machine (or if I should switch it out for something else - an always-on external passport?) - Suggestions needed here.

  1. Leave Crashplan…for Backblaze? (but still need to look into pricing and how they work with Synology) I have 6 TB of data I need backed up. (copy 2)

  2. A more automated way of creating a 3rd copy instead of swapping out passports every few weeks.

  3. Still need to see where I would include copying mac/synology

Everyone’s thoughts?

1 Like
2

A common bit of advice for backup is the 3-2-1 strategy: 3 complete copies of your data, 2 of which are local (but not in the same place), and 1 or which is offsite. In my case I add an additional copy: a full clone pulled weekly. So I have

  • Two Time Machines – one on an SSD that can go offsite and one on a local external drive. I tried using Synology for TM and failed repeatedly after Synology corrupted the TMs, so I gave that up.
  • Offsite to Backblaze with the schedule set to “continuously”. (I use TripMode to prevent Backblaze from using my mobile data plan for backing up when my laptop is on my iPhone’s hotspot.)
  • Clone to an SSD weekly.

(I had a lot of success with CrashPlan for years; then their cloud suddenly went rogue on my account and trashed years of archived data. CP tech support tried mightily to reverse the situation but gave up. I also gave up and went to Backblaze, which other than their initial fumbling to get the client working with Mojave, has been rock solid.)

1 Like
3

I have moved away from Synology myself, so my backup strategy is:

  1. External SSD for TimeMachine
  2. External SSD (another one) for a clone run daily
  3. Backblaze pushing entire disk to offsite backup

Also, although NOT a backup strategy, all my files reside in a cloud service of some kind. I’m currently exploring moving to iCloud, but currently my data resides all in Dropbox (except movies and pictures). Therefore, everything is also accessible anywhere and versioned.

My pictures are in iCloud but I also use Google Photos as a separate “backup”.

4

I have had exactly the same issues with an external hard disk (SSD). After going through a complete backup half a dozen times, and always ending up with the same message, I signed up for Backblaze a couple of weeks ago.

So far, so good! I’ve recovered a few files from the backups to test it and I am surprised to see that I can still use the “Revert to…” menu in iWorks to enter time machine for my office files stored on iCloud.

I’ve been wanting to move backups online for a while, I’m fed up with plugging in hard disks all the time.

5

For those who use Backblaze and back up your Synology to B2. I am stuck on the task creation or maybe I am overlooking something.

I can’t create a task to backup the root of my Synology. I have 10 top-level parent folders (music, photo, video, etc).

Q1 - Should each folder be uploaded to it’s own B2 bucket?

I didn’t do this, I ended up just re-creating the parent folders from my Synology into my b2 bucket.

But when it came to tasks, I could only create 1 task. I couldn’t create additional tasks, it said I have to create subtasks.

Am I missing something here?

Also concerning sync direction, I assume it should be set to “upload local changes only”.
Suggestions?

6

Hello all, I need some help on this one.

I am backing up my Synology (5TB of data) to a B2 Bucket. It’s been running for almost a month. Synology Cloud Backup claims that everything is up to date and running regularly.

But when I check the Backblaze B2 Bucket, there is at least close to 100,000 files missing equaling about 1 TB of data that is not yet backed up.

I have tried un-syncing and re-syncing the connection, the tasks.
I made sure to check the concurrent uploads to B2 and the polling period is set to 7200.

I can’t figure how to make sure it does a full and proper backup with Backblaze.

Thoughts?

7

The only thing that came to mind is to check to see if there are some sort of exclusions enabled.

I don’t use B2 but I do use the regular Backblaze service and I think it defaults to not backing up files over a certain size (2000gb, I think?). If there were some sort of similar exclusion in your situation that would explain how it could think it is backed up even though not everything is backed up.

(Have you contacted Backblaze support and asked them? I’d definitely recommend that too.)

8

Like @tjluoma said I’d contact Backblaze support. Also what I do is my Photos partition is a separate backup from my internal HD. How do you have your files sorted on your Synology?

9

Thank you @tjluoma @Jonathan_Davis, I contacted Backblaze support and explained the issue. They told me this is a Synology issue not their problem. So I submitted a ticket to Synology and waiting for their reply.

@Jonathan_Davis as far as my files go on the Synology. Everything is broken into parent folders.

  • Projects
  • Documents - FamilyMemberName
  • Photos
  • Music
  • Video
10

Personally I would have projects and documents as one bucket, then Photos, Music, and Video as separate buckets. Individual buckets could work too. Maybe Synology is different, I know there’s some Synology specific apps to backup to B2.

11

@Jonathan_Davis I took you advise and tried doing things on an individual bucket style. I didn’t do all the parent folders, I just picked one parent folder (after 2 days of uploading). Synology says it’s completed backup. I did a file comparison, I am short 4,000 files equalling to 200 GB. I just submitted a ticket to Synology to see what’s going on and do some debugging.

12

Thanks for taking my advice. Frustrating though that still files are missing. When you hear back reply back in this thread as I and I’m sure others have concern and questions as well.