Backup using arq and/or hyper backup on synology

I’m revamping my backup process. Does anybody have any experience with arq vs using hyper backup on synology? I’m looking for backup that has version control Thanks.

Hyper Backup is native to Synology and
offers a variety of backup models, (Rsync,
Rsync single copy, WebDAV, etc.) to a
variety of local and cloud services.

Arq is a pretty sophisticated backup program
which will also let you target local and cloud
services, and like Synology also offer their own
cloud.

Yes, both do version control.

How creative does your backup process need
to be? Backup should be “set and forget” to
raise the odds of it getting done. :slight_smile:

IMHO If you have a Synology use Hyper Backup

When I had a Synology, I played quite a bit with HyperBackup. What I found was some idiosyncrasies. For example, although it is claimed that you can set up backups on, for example, an hourly basis, I was never able to get it to work on anything other than a daily basis. That may well be sufficient for your needs, however. I found the versioning worked although the interface was a bit kludgy. I tried encrypting backups and had some bad experiences with being unable to access the encrypted backups (and I know I had the correct password stored in 1Password, and I tried several restarts with the same issues) but eventually I did seem to get it to work. I was also able to use their HyperBackup Explorer utility on a Mac with my B2 store mounted via services like CloudMounter to browse the files, so my testing suggested that if the Synology died and I chose not to replace it I could still retrieve the files.

I also experimented with Arq, using a pre-flight script to mount the Synology shares (there is a blog post on arqbackup.com that explains how to do this and provides the AppleScript code), and I found this also worked.

HyperBackup can also, as noted, backup to an rsync server (which you could in theory run on your Mac, but of course that is not offsite presumably) or another (potentially off-site) Synology.

Another option for versioned backup on Synology is iDrive, which has a package for Synology and provides versioned cloud backup. As I noted in another thread, I am currently testing out iDrive as I got a 5TB plan for $1.00 for the first year, so I figured I would try it out.

Ah, I see that @Jonathan_Davis has linked the blog post explaining how to do the pre-backup script.

You should be able to manually trigger an Arq backup, and when the script runs enter your password into the dialog and have it saved to Keychain so that you don’t have to hardcode a password into a file for security purposes.

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Something I heard about the other day the got my attention, I think it was on the MGG podcast, it was suggested to run an SFTP server on the NAS and use Arq to backup to it via SFTP rather than as a mounted drive. The logic being that SFTP was a “proper” client/server protocol that was more resilient to blips in network connectivity. (Not sure how true this is but it sounds reasonable).

I certainly thought this was an interesting approach and filed away in the back of my mind for future reference. Anyone tried that sort of setup, is it any better?

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I actually use Arq this way in that my iMacPro allows SFTP connections and my laptop stores it’s Arq data there on a Drobo (the iMacPro also stores it’s Arq data on the same drive and then BackBlaze sends the Arq-Ives up to the cloud).

You could certainly use this approach to store your Arq data on a NAS. However, I understood the OP’s question to be how to use Arq to send the data from the NAS to the cloud, and I don’t see any way to do that other than by mounting the NAS’s shares to a Mac running Arq.

ah right, I hadn’t really figured out if the NAS was the target or the source, I’m unfamiliar with hyper backup, perhaps there was an implication there that I missed.

Your backup system sounds pretty good. :slight_smile:

Yes, it was MGG podcast #775. Time stamp 29:48.
https://www.macobserver.com/podcasts/persistence-is-reality-mac-geek-gab-775/