NAS to NAS backup plan

[snorkel]

I have a NAS at my home and I'm going to set up a second NAS at my office and would like to do a backup between the two.
I have a continuous private VPN running between home and office via the firewalls, so no open ports for hackers
Let's just focus on one side and I can duplicate the idea going the other way
Snapshots are turned on for malware protection and file versioning
My data is backed up to idrive directly from the NAS

Wondering what the best backup scheme is to copy data to my office NAS. This backup would mostly be for a "total system failure or fire/flood/theft" at my home since I'm already protected (theoretically) from ransomware by the snapshots and also by the idrive backup. HBS3 sync job, RRTR backup job or snapshot replica. I know they will all work. I just can't seem to glean from a lot of reading what the smart idea is.

Need the path to backup enlightenment.

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

I have a NAS at my home and I'm going to set up a second NAS at my office and would like to do a backup between the two.

understood

I have a continuous private VPN running between home and office via the firewalls, so no open ports for hackers

good. i also posted possible vpn implementations for remote access
viewtopic.php?t=172429

traditional vpn server, tailscale, or cloudflare tunnels.

Let's just focus on one side and I can duplicate the idea going the other way
Snapshots are turned on for malware protection and file versioning

I believe someone on forum mentioned that for the qnap snapshots to be effective, you need to set 50% reserved for snapshots, for it to be effective enough against malware. That's too pricey for me, so i only used the barest minimum 5% though that is probably not enough for malware. I only use it for minor mistakes that need to rollback without resorting to my main backup to restore something.


file versioning takes up a lot of space, so i don't use it, so not much to comment on this

My data is backed up to idrive directly from the NAS

question. did you make sure that the data you backed up to idrive is encrypted? if the data isn't important or sensitive, might be ok. but if it is, always make sure it's encrypted before backing up to there or anywhere offsite.

Wondering what the best backup scheme is to copy data to my office NAS. This backup would mostly be for a "total system failure or fire/flood/theft" at my home since I'm already protected (theoretically) from ransomware by the snapshots and also by the idrive backup.

if you do a 3-2-1 backup plan, you should be ok.

meaning, 1 NAS (this is your primary nas), 1 local backup for it (a 2nd nas, or external usb storage or other), and the third a remote backup (in your case this is the idrive cloud backup service)


an airgap backup strategy can also help against malware
https://www.veritas.com/information-cen ... gap-backup


my own example of an airgap strategy, i would backup manually, then keep the backup offline for long periods. So if by chance malware does infect the network, it would not have the opportunity to infect the backup as well, because it's not even connected or powered on. This is part of what air gapping means.

Of course if you need to automate backup, you can still do so using your third backup like the cloud.

But your 2nd lan backup, you can use that as your airgapped backup that is kept inaccessible to the rest of the network for long periods of time. Thus reducing the window of opportunity for malware to hit.


Just some suggestions

HBS3 sync job, RRTR backup job or snapshot replica. I know they will all work. I just can't seem to glean from a lot of reading what the smart idea is.

Need the path to backup enlightenment.

RTRR is strictly only for syncing between 2 qnaps (it doesn't work on a non qnap). RSYNC is sync between your QNAP and a non QNAP (you could also use for QNAP as well).

For backup do a one way rsync from your main nas to your backup. Extra settings are like, delete extra files at destination (depends on your requirements, but this is what i use).

Then later when you need to restore, you can set HBS restore job from your backup to your main nas to restore. I recommend that when not trying to restore, to disable the restore jobs, so you don't accidentally trigger it by mistake.

[snorkel]

Thanks for the comments.

Sorry, I consider the QNAP snapshots to be "file versioning" which you can access from client computers or as the NAS admin.

I was speaking of Snapshot replica from one NAS to the other, but it sounds like overkill and huge use of disk space.

idrive backup is encrypted before it leaves the nas/computer and that is maintained on their servers.

Regarding 3-2-1, I forgot to mention that I do a sync job to an external hard drive attached to the NAS at 5:00 a.m. It has a job for every day of the week and a weekly and a monthly job. The jobs are set to delete any files not in the source. So, this is really just in case the NAS dies, I can pull the data from 5:00 a.m. and get the data onto a Windows share if that's the only option. I know it's NOT backup because source files that have been deleted are also deleted on the destination.

The main question I have was the NAS to NAS piece of the backup. You mentioned doing an RSYNC, but I think you meant RTRR since it is QNAP to QNAP. I'm guessing this is what I will do vs. a HBS3 sync job (NOT a real backup) and Snapshot replica (seems like it might take up more disk space).