I started using Crashplan back when they still had a consumer-focused product, but now their focus is B2B. I still use them because I’m grandfathered into a reasonable price that includes backing up both my computer and NAS. But their interface is pretty dreadful. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at other options. What’s the current state of the art?
It looks like Backblaze offers NAS backup as part of their B2 service, but it’s astonishingly not encrypted.
Is there a user-friendly service that will backup my local hard drive plus my NAS? What’s everyone using?
While the Backblaze B2 service does not encrypt files for you you can use something like Arq or Duplicati to encrypt the files before they are uploaded to your B2 storage. I use both programs to backup files in this way. Arq from my Mac and Duplicati (installed via Docker) for files on my UnRAID NAS. As all of the encryption is done on my devices prior to upload Backblaze have no knowledge of the encryption keys used.
I have a Synology NAS and use the built-in Glacier Backup app to backup to an Amazon AWS Glacier bucket very inexpensively. I use AWS for several things, including backing up a few websites and storage of some big files and I pay less than $20/month for everything.
I also do a local hard drive backup up certain important folders as well.
Depending on the size of your data it might be cheaper to buy a second NAS, do an initial replication and put it in a different location (family or friends) and have it sync incrementally. Both parties can actually enjoy storage and media, whilst personal data is secured through user and account management.
@simonsmark has a good point. If we are talking about huge data amounts, syncing the data to a second NAS in a different location is not a bad idea, if possible.
My Synology NAS is being backed up weekly to a USB drive. I rotate two USB drives, one of them is being stored off-site.
Apart from that, one Synology volume is being backed up to Synology C2 (just under 1TB of data), too. The data on this volume is very important to me (documents, pictures and stuff like that).
Backing up ALL my data to the cloud is not a viable option to me:
Too expensive.
In case of disaster, even with fast internet speeds, it is not much fun to restore a lot of TB of data (which is one of the reasons why some cloud solutions still offer shipping hard disks containing the cloud data to their customers when needed).
@DomBett How much data to you keep on AWS Glacier for that $20/monthly? Have you needed to download big chunks – say 5GB or something like that – if so, what’s the experience like in terms of download time? Glacier has always interested me, but it feels like “keep it and forget it”, which would make sense for backup storage of last resort, I suppose.
I rarely have to access my backups so I can’t say how the download process is. But it is generally a backup of last resort since the RAID of the NAS is itself a kind of redundancy already.
As of right now, I have 4.6TB of data from two different NAS on there and last month Glacier cost me $14. Restoring from Glacier is NOT something you will want to do regularly as the point of Glacier is be a last resort because while it is cheap, it is slow.
If you need something to be more accessible, then S3 will be a better choice, but it will be easier to access.
Some people recommend Wasabi as less expensive than Amazon, but I haven’t tried them out.