Hi friends! Would love to know what your backup solutions are!
I currently have a DS1522+ with 5x 18TB Drives, with SHR1 for redundancy.
I also have (2) Iron-wolfs Internal HDs in external enclosures connected to the NAS for Hyper-Backup backups of the NAS.
I also have cloud storage for my offsite.
Is there something I should be thinking about in this setup? Anything I am missing? Would you get a DX517 or a Synology 2-Bay (RAID 0) to replace the (2) connected Iron-wolfs?
I want to ensure my storage investment gets the most and that I do it the best way possible.
So the general 3-2-1 backup solution I setup for businesses is pretty simple, but very bulletproof:
Hardware:
They get 3 total Synology’s (or 2 and one to the cloud). 2 of them are on prem, and generally identical, but if they want to save some money they can upgrade the primary, while having a less powerful backup just in case. Then either buy a NAS for offsite, or go to whatever cloud they want (Synology C2 is normally what I go with just because it works really well)
Onsite Setup
On the onsite NAS I will setup snapshot replication directly in-between the two on site units. Normally with a physical cable directly in-between them to limit traffic. If they are not running a AD server elsewhere we can either just add every user account twice (one on both systems) or setup a LDAP server (really prefer LDAP, but for 2/3 users its not needed)
Each users computer is then searching for a DNS address of the primary NAS, with at TTL of like 5 min.
Recovering onsite
Recovering onsite is really easy. If the primary goes down, you just need to update the DNS address from pointing to the primary to the secondary. Then hit ‘fail over’ on the backup unit under snapshots. The second unit will just become the primary and everything will continue on!
The only thing that it will miss is the hyper backup, but that is not too big of a deal
Offsite setup
For offsite its always hyper backup! I either will setup hyper backup to their own NAS (normally at the owners house) or to the cloud. If I am setting it up to another Synology I will always add snapshots to the hyper backup folder. This is for the really low chance that the entire primary NAS gets fully hacked. With snapshots (only keep the last 2 weekly ones) even if the main NAS gets full root access, and deletes its own backup, the offsite NAS will actually keep an extra copy as a ‘just in case’ measure
overall pretty easy! I do the same more or less for NFS shares for VMs!
If I understand your setup correctly, NAS 1 is the primary, NAS 2 is basically a copy of NAS 1 via snapshot duplication reguardless which Synology NAS i purchase, and then off prem is hyper backup or cloud.
If I understand it correctly, I need to get a 2-Bay Nas and that becomes my NAS #2, however, that NAS would have to be Raid 0 to be a copy of NAS 1 due to the amount of space on NAS 1, will snapshot duplication still work?
Rex I owe you a lunch and tickets to Dubai my GUY!
@SynologyRichie Yeah that tends to be my setup for businesses! However if you are a home user (someone who is ok with a little bit of downtime, and you can manually grab the files you need) doing a hyperbackup to an external hard drive is totally fine!
I feel like such an amateur in comparison. I’m backing up to a local drive along with a ~monthly usb for most files. My offsite goes to a single disk ds120 at another house. Now that I have the 1522 I plan to eventually replicate to the 220 it replaced. Replication isn’t available on the 120 so it’s just HB to it for now.
@Brian To be fair I set this up for businesses who do not bat an eye at a few thousand dollars if it can prevent even just a few hours of downtime.
For offsite backups I always use hyper-backup (unless they want to be able to edit files at the offsite, then I will use drive share sync). Its really setup as a solid disaster recovery backup
@SynologyRichie I am the exact same way, how I ended up in this situation.
So what you can do is connect the two NAS units directly, and create a static network in-between them (put one of them on 10.200.10.2 and the other on 10.200.10.3) you will then be able to reference the IP “10.200.10.2” from the .3 unit when setting up the share sync. This will force it to go over that ethernet cable that is directly in-between the two units.
@Will I am just a Synology fan and a home user but I am having a trouble to directly connect the NAS1 with my offisite NAS2 with your suggested set up for the purpose of backup only. I have also Synology router at NAS1 destination and when I seek a help on Synology Facebook forums people are asking why I want to connect them via VPN when the hyper-backup itself is already encrypted, thus protected. Others are saying it is too complicated and I should set site to site VPN protection between two routers. Some are suggesting other ways with Mtik Wireguard…etc.etc. So I am getting crazy. Even if I ask official Synology distributors their staff is also suggesting all other ways… All I want is that it is connected directly and safely but I failed to do it… Both NASes are connected and the Hyper-backup is working 100% but I have both devices at home and before I move the NAS2 to another location I wanted to make sure it is protected as per your videos but I do not know how to set it up… Therefore I would really appreciate any of your advice.
