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by atonse 3255 days ago
Is anyone using such tools as a backup for their NAS (and then using their NAS for time machine?).

That would beat having to install something like Backblaze on every family member's machines. Cloud backup is great but it's always better to have a local (LAN) copy and then an off-site copy.

4 comments

I use borg (attic fork) backing up to rsync.net for my home server. All my machines back up locally to that machine (mostly using SyncThing), then it backs itself up every hour or so. It's not perfect but it does work really rather well.

Borg is really nice, and rsync.net is of that variety of service that are always my favourites: it does one thing very well.

Also they offer a discount if you use borg or attic (possibly others) as they turn off their ZFS snapshot system and assume your software handles that.

How much data and what's your monthly cost? I have a 2TB storage VPS for under $10/month. rsync.net looks very good but is possibly total overkill for my needs. Definitely don't need >1 snapshot/day as that's what my hourly local backup is for.
It's a bit more expensive than most options but the price does vary by how much of your data is duplicated. At the mo I have 1TB of data being backed up but it squashes down to under 550GB with borg. Monthly price for me is about $17 (paid yearly though).

I'm happy with the extra price for my use, but yeah it's not the best option if you have a lot of unduplicated data.

If you're interested, here's the link to the borg/attic pricing page: http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html

Can I ask where you got the VPS? That's a really great price for 2TB!
At present I'm using a provider in Lithuania called time4vps. Overall the service is good (assuming you are connecting from Europe) but to use their website I have to disable my ad-blocking & privacy add-ons, which I don't have to do on other providers' sites. Not sure why that is.

I'll probably try Delimiter once they start offering service in London, as they also have some similar low cost + high storage plans.

> Is anyone using such tools as a backup for their NAS (and then using their NAS for time machine?).

Do you mean backup to the NAS or for backing up the NAS itself to a third location?

Either way, there's no need for an either/or approach. Just do both. I've tried multiple backup applications and many support local and remote backup options as standard. I'm using Borg and Back In Time and with Borg it's just a second cronjob with nearly identical scripts for the off-site backup over SSH. With Back In Time I was using the AWS CLI to push the backups to S3, but I found a better deal with cheaper storage. I have about 200GB data in total but want a 1TB archive available online for older backup sets.

Side note - OP's review is helpful but Borg Backup is oddly listed under 'Attic', which it was forked from years ago. Don't bother looking for Attic if you are comparing backup tools available today.

> Is anyone using such tools as a backup for their NAS (and then using their NAS for time machine?).

I use borgbackup to back-up my stuff locally with rclone to mirror the borg repository in the cloud (personal Google Drive in my case) and have also experimented with running borgbackup to an offsite Raspberry Pi.

Duplicity is pretty easy to use with Backblaze B2 as a cloud storage backend - that's what I use to backup my NAS.