What would you guys suggest I do backup wise?
I currently have an iMac at my office(I am self employed) and then currently a MacBook Pro and a MacBook(planning on switching to just one of them) and then and iPad and iPhone and my wife has a MacBook Pro and iPhone and iPad
On my home network I just got a 2tb Qnap Nas that is connected through Ethernet and I am working on setting it up correctly. I also have backblaze running on my machines.
So I know I’m covered with backblaze, but I want local backups also. I have the NAS and this is my first time using it, so I am trying to get it set up the way I want to. So any tips there would be helpful for how to get my wife’s laptop to backup to it also
We both have iCloud with the max storage and we both use photos(her even more than me) from our iPhones for our kids etc.
How would you suggest I back up our photos we take on our iPhone that are saved in iCloud onto my NAS? I keep searching online and am pretty confused!
Thanks for the help!
There are lots of approaches, but if you find it bewildering, perhaps just use QNAP for Time machine?
I actually use my QNAP NAS to sync from cloud services and snapshot backup from that for a somewhat unusual multi service backup routine. Not something I’d recommend, but I have some less than usual circumstances on some of it.
In terms of photos from iDevices take a look at Qphoto, the QNAP photo app. It isn’t automatic backup though from what I remember.
Hope that helps.
Like @sylumer already mentioned, the easiest way would be using QNAP in combination with Time Machine: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/how-to/tutorial/article/time-machine-support
I have done it. It works until it does not work… I am not sure if QNAP is to blame. The problem is that Time Machine is a proprietary Apple solution and QNAP has to support it without really getting support from Apple to support it. Time Machine can be quite unreliable in combination with network-attached storage, although the situation has improved significantly. Even with Apples Time Capsule, I tended to have issues. It is no substantial problem, if you are ok with the fact, that Time Machine might end up to start over from the beginning because it might not be able read from the backup eventually…
A different solution would be to use a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner to do your backups from your Macs to your QNAP NAS. I have done that and it works fine.
With AFPS and the announcement that CCC supports AFPS snapshots, I stopped using my NAS for backing up my Macs. I use external USB drives to do clone backups once a week. I think that Apple will stop using Time Machine one day. AFPS and its snapshot capability might be the future.
If it only comes down to have an automatic photo backup outside of Apples Photos on your NAS, you might look for an app solution. What I found is this:
But I really have no first-hand experience with this app.
Whatever, the easiest way really might be Time Machine and having your QNAP as the Time Machine destination.
@sylumer wrote:
I actually use my QNAP NAS to sync from cloud services and snapshot backup from that for a somewhat unusual multi service backup routine. Not something I’d recommend, but I have some less than usual circumstances on some of it.
Same here! It is hard to explain, but with a NAS you start slowly and you are getting more and more crazy the longer you use it. 
I have used the qnap photo backup app and I probably just need to configure it a bit more as I was having trouble getting older pictures from the iPhone onto the NAS.
I was thinking about google photos on the iPhone as another solution because if I’m correct in thinking, it will automatically save the photo in both locations then? Google and iCloud ?
What I like do do first is think about the failure scenarios I’m trying to protect against. These include theft, destruction (fire, etc), data loss via accidents or malware, and software failures. Think about how you would recover from each problem and design a backup strategy to implement that.
While Backblaze is good, would it be fast enough to restore if your business computer was destroyed? How much downtime can you tolerate?
Examples of my strategies include Carbon Copy Cloner being run before I make any significant system changes, Time Machine for versioning to both usb drives and a NAS, and CrashPlan for offsite.