Best inexpensive NAS / software for offsite backup?

[mannoia]

Hi all – long time lurker, first time poster here.* We had some serious flooding during hurricane Sandy, so I’m trying to figure out my best option for full offsite backup without paying an arm and a leg for the cloud.* I have a QNAP TS119PII with 3TB of storage in my house, and keep everything on it – mostly documents, music, home movies and pics.* It’s about half full, expanding rapidly (HD home video of young kids!), and is accessed by a range of devices (windows, android, iOS, Squeezebox, WD TV Live, LG bluray player).* I back up real-time locally with a Fantom 3TB drive via eSATA, and critical files are also stored on a combination of dropbox, google drive and picasa, but I’d like to be able to back up everything remotely.
*
I have an offsite location (2nd home/rental property), and would like to put an inexpensive NAS there as a backup server.* I was thinking of another QNAP, but after reading Tim’s article about enabling rsync on the WD My Book Live, I’m wondering if that’s the cheapest solution given my limited need.
*
Ideally real-time two way synchronization would be great (ie files changed on either device are automatically updated on the other device) since I might theoretically want to access/offload files (music/pics/video) locally at the second location occasionally, but I’m happy to just have the device at the remote location function as pure backup since I can access everything remotely on the QNAP.* Primary location has FIOS 35/35 and secondary has TWC 15/5.
*
My plan was to buy a WD My Book Live, replicate the QNAP at the primary location, and then move the WD to the second location and use rsync for one way back up on a daily basis.
*
Does this make sense?* Is a WD My Book Live sufficient for these purposes?* Is rsync the right way to go?* Any inexpensive alternative devices (Buffalo LinkStation Pro?)/software (RTRR?) folks might recommend?
*
Thanks!
*

 

[stevech]

Best option is a USB3 or eSATA disk or two, external.
make a habit of backups every x days and keep the drive off-site most of the time. Or toggle drive A/B.
Or put it in the attic.

Or put a $250 NAS in the attic and run cat5 down. Like a 2-bay drive from Synology or QNAP. Or cheaper/slower, a 1-bay network drive from a mass market company like Seagate.

Note too that 64GB thumb drives are low cost now. Many of us can fit all our irreplaceable files on one or two of these. And use something like SecondCopy software to automate. And SafeHouse freeware to encrypt at the drive level.

On-line backup is costly, too slow due to your ISP upstream speed, and you wouldn't dare allow sensitive financial data to go up there. They all re-encrypt and they have the keys. They have to do this to answer a court order for info. Problem is disgruntled employee gets the keys.

 

[mannoia]

Thanks for the reply! I'm really looking for something offsite... last year Irene came in through the roof, and this year Sandy came in through the ground floor!

Is location 1 (35/35) really too slow? Or even location 2 (15/5) for that matter? 35Mb/s (4.4MB/s) is theoretically 15GB/hr, and realistically I figured I could count on at least 25% of that. Eg I uploaded ~30GB of music to Google Music in ~8 hours, and then did it again to Amazon Music in around 10 hours. So I thought for a typical overnight 8-10 hour period I could count on location 1 being good for transferring ~25-30GB of data (it's typically .MTS files off my camcorder from 100MB up to 2GB).

Now location 2 is only 15/5, but I'm not looking to synchronize both ways, so I thought I could generally ignore the upload number. Based on the numbers above I figured it was good for ~10-15GB of data per night.

Maybe I don't understand rsync properly, but I thought the point was it only changes things incrementally so the amount of data transferred is minimal. Obviously if I drop 20GB of new data onto the location 1 NAS it would take a while for location 2 to catch up, but most of the time I'm only adding max 1-2GB at a time.

Thanks again!

 

[stevech]

I've tried many off-site. Here are the ones I can recommend (rank-ordered):

CrashPlan - Easily copy to a friend's disk or NAS. Free.
CrashPlan - The operate a cloud store as well. It's priced well.
Acronis - their cloud store is priced well: 250GB, multiple computers.
JungleDisk - (reseller of Amazon S3).
OpenDrive - was horrible. Last 10 months or so, reliable. Good pricing.
Amazon S3 - pretty good pricing.

 

[mannoia]

OK but per my original post I have my own offsite location and want to put a second NAS there to back up the QNAP at location 1 remotely.

I considered using CrashPlan (I could be my own friend!), but wouldn't it be easier to just use rsync to connect the two directly?

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding something.

Thanks!

 

[stevech]

rSync - yes, if you can get it to work.
Didn't realize/recall that you owned both ends.

 

[mannoia]

Hmmm... is that because rSync is finicky in general, or because setting up rSync on the WD My Book Live specifically is finicky?

Here's what I'm thinking:

1) Buy the WD, follow Tim's instructions and get rSync running -- cheaper but maybe hard to set up / unreliable? (~$200)

2) Buy another QNAP (eg TS-112) and run rSync -- presumably easiest because QNAP to QNAP but most expensive (~$300)

OR

3) Buy the QNAP and use CrashPlan (there's a beta CrashPlan QPKG for ARM based QNAP NASes)

I guess (4) is theoretically to run CrashPlan on the WD My Book Live? After searching around on the web a bit it looks like because it runs Debian I could theoretically run a script to get it to run, but that sounds like way more than I'm ready for. Or I guess I could run a computer at location 2 24/7, but that sort of defeats the purpose

Anyway if I end up going the QNAP route do you recommend Crashplan or rSync?

Thanks again, and sorry for so many questions. I'm really excited to get this running though!