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For off-site backup purposes I am looking at putting a NAS in 2 places (my own and another) and having them sync. This can be done with rsync obviously, but I'm looking for a bit more security data-wise

Instead of going for a RAID (high-availability) sollution, I was hoping to achieve a history/incremental/time-machine effect, but I'm unable to find if that can be achieved for both machine.

Lets say house A and House B both have a NAS with plenty space. House A gets an incremental/timemachine backup on House B's NAS, and House B gets on on the House A NAS.

Example would be the Time-Backup feature of Synology:

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/tutorials/527

The problem is this sentence:

Please note that if you enable Time Backup Service on the destination server, the destination server can only provide Time Backup service as the backup destination.

I'm not completely sure what they mean, but it sounds like you can time-backup from A to B, but you cannot use that feature for a backup from B to A anymore?

Is there an off the shelf solution that enables me to do these kinds of backups from A to B and back?

(note: it is not a master-master situation where the files need to be merged. House A has their backup dir and House B has their backup dir, they need not be combined)

The initial wording might be confusing, but while a fancy mac-like "time machine" solution is great, it is probably enough to get some sort of snapshotting / incremental backup going. No need for too fancy stuff, just a "last week", "last month" kinda thing is enough.

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  • Something simpler like a rotating backup (incremental?) would be useable as well of course, but the thing is: local delete should be recovered from :)
    – Nanne
    Sep 1, 2014 at 19:28
  • Actually you can use cloud station to replicate a folder between two Syns and this can work in both directions. Cloud station keeps 32 versions of each file. Not quite the same as Time Backup but maybe close enough for your use.
    – JoelAZ
    Nov 28, 2014 at 11:05

2 Answers 2

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I know that in theory you can install CrashPlan onto a Synology, but even though I use it to backup my computers, I haven't had the time to try and install it on my NAS yet. I've read it's a little bit involved since it's normally a Java-based GUI desktop application, but connecting to a remote Crashplan daemon is officially supported, so once the daemon is running you can use the normal software to configure it.

Crashplan can do exactly the kind of A->B and B->A backup you suggest, the idea being you can have a friend backup to your disks, while you backup to a friends' disks. There's also a paid version of Crashplan, but that's only for backing up to their servers, the software itself is free.

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  • I'll check it out and see if it's easy enough to use. I was going to shy away from homebrew sollutions, wich tend to degrade / involve hackery over time, but if this is officially supported it could be a contender!
    – Nanne
    Sep 2, 2014 at 6:41
  • Hmm. having doubts with "install java". This is something synology doesn't have natively and relies on much knowledge and tinkering? There are some packages, but they don't seem to run for each OS version, nor for every cpu type. I'm not looking forward to "auto-upgrade OS" or whatever breaking stuff. Kinda conservative, I know, but backups should just work. Keeping it in mind though
    – Nanne
    Sep 2, 2014 at 6:46
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It looks like QNAP supports bittorrent sync, which in turn supports versioning.

QNAP's site doesn't seem to mention versioning, but page 12 of this pdf implies that bittorrentsync does support it.

If it works, this is an off the shelf sollution for all my current needs. No experience with it (yet) though

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