OT: Home backup strategy - NAS, DAS, Time Machine

[9tubes]

Originally Posted by 9tubes

Time machine to a 2-bay Synology, plus Backblaze. Just in case of ransomware I also do a full drive clone twice per month to an external drive and then disconnect it.

Originally Posted by .RJ

What does the cloud storage cost you?

$100/yr unlimited storage as I recall. Check the site.

[tylercheung]

I had an old PC motherboard I put into a Fractal Design Node 304 chassis and installed TrueNAS OS and some drives on it. Kind of a convoluted way of getting to a Synology.

Offsite/online backups via backblaze

[Alistair]

Related question… I’m all iOS at home (no PC, no Mac). Is there a good solution for backing up photos and iCloud Drive to a NAS? Already have extended iCloud storage online, but would like to add something local.

[foo_fighter]

Depends how much experience you have but icloudpd in a docker container works well for photos. PhotoSync and Immich also work well for photos.

Originally Posted by Alistair

Related question… I’m all iOS at home (no PC, no Mac). Is there a good solution for backing up photos and iCloud Drive to a NAS? Already have extended iCloud storage online, but would like to add something local.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by foo_fighter

Depends how much experience you have but icloudpd in a docker container works well for photos. PhotoSync and Immich also work well for photos.

Where am I going to run the docker container? No Mac or PC. Or would it run in the NAS (which means a more expensive NAS, but that might be ok)? The doc says it just does the photos library - is there anything similar to do the iCloud Drive (tax docs, etc)?

[foo_fighter]

You run it on the NAS and it logs into your iCloud account to download directly to the NAS unattended. I don't think it takes up much cpu or ram.

I only use iCloud for photo backup but there is another docker to sync both drive and photos: https://github.com/mandarons/icloud-...main/README.md

Originally Posted by Alistair

Where am I going to run the docker container? No Mac or PC. Or would it run in the NAS (which means a more expensive NAS, but that might be ok)? The doc says it just does the photos library - is there anything similar to do the iCloud Drive (tax docs, etc)?

[marciero]

Do these local NAS solutions have device specific syncing? I currently just use Dropbox, which backs up and syncs files across devices in real time, but only syncs specified files on a given device.

Originally Posted by foo_fighter

You run it on the NAS and it logs into your iCloud account to download directly to the NAS unattended. I don't think it takes up much cpu or ram.

I only use iCloud for photo backup but there is another docker to sync both drive and photos: https://github.com/mandarons/icloud-...main/README.md

Would this docker container approach work with Db files? -I'd like to back them up without syncing/saving them on a local machine.

Lastly, what about files on web platforms like Colab or Google drive- is there a way to sync and back those up directly?

[marciero]

Originally Posted by bigbill

I'm writing a thesis and I do a manual backup at the end of each day to a Seagate External 4 TB SSHD. I have a smaller Imation 1 TB that I take when I travel.

Many schools will have multiple repository options. Mine has One Drive and Google drive, with unlimited storage. Between those and my paid Dropbox- 1TB with syncing- I am probably covered, without being tethered to an external device (setting aside privacy considerations for some of that content). But I suppose enterprise level solutions offered by employers gets away from "Home" backup strategy

[weaponsgrade]

I ended up paying about $150 for UFS Explorer. It was the most expensive of the data recovery software I looked at, but I'm sure it's a lot less than taking it to a specialist.

Here's the saga for those who care. Prior to giving in, I tried Disk Drill. Disk Drill seemed to pull up all my files. I could see everything in the free preview mode, but Disk Drill also assessed the chances of recovery as "low." That seemed weird. The bigger problem was that Disk Drill didn't seem able to recover the folder structure. I think I'd just be getting a big dump of thousands of renamed files in one directory.

I managed to boot my Mac off a Linux Mint USB stick. I could see the partitions in the disk manager, but I couldn't get the partition I needed to mount through the GUI. I came across a blog post from Synology that walked through the command line steps of using Ubuntu to recover a RAID drive pulled from their NAS. I made a Ubuntu bootable USB, was able to boot into it, but was never able to launch any of the applications. I tried on two different Macs and it was the same thing.

I think I could've figured out the command line steps to get the MyCloud drive mounted in Mint. There were some other free utilities I found but in the mean time I hooked the drive up to my Mac and let UFS Explorer scan the drive. UFS Explorer finished the scan and bam! There was a nice GUI showing a recovered folder structure with all my files in the right place. It was just a matter of ponying up for the paid version so I could copy everything over to another drive. At that point I had better things to do and so I did.

WD was pretty unhelpful. Their best "advice" was a 15% off discount code to their store. I bought a Synology DS223j and big external drive to act as a backup for the NAS. Still working on setting everything up.

[Derosid]

I’ve had mixed results over the years using different backup strategies with my Macs and PCs. For the Mac the easiest was when Time Machine came out, that really simplified things. But I keep having my backup drive take a dump and ended up losing files.

For the last 10 years I’ve been using Dropbox, and pay the $100 per year for 2TB of storage. I keep all of my data files in the Dropbox folder. This has the advantage of giving me all my files at work and at home, so my desktop feels the same. If one of my computers crashes I still have all my files, I just have to re-install the apps and I’m back up and runing. Added benefit, each of my Macs acts as an additional backup to each other in case Dropbox has a problem.