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I am looking for an affordable remote backup solution for my small business network. I've tried the Seagate Blackarmor 220 in the past and I HATE IT! Essentially the only option it provides me for remote backup is standard FTP (not even SFTP) and even that is spotty and unreliable.

I've been looking into the Synology line of NAS drives, specifically the DS211. What I really like is that it runs rsync, so I would be able to do really good incremental backups using DeltaCopy for Windows and could do my backups over a secure connection. Does anyone have any experience using Synology NAS drives for this purpose?

Also, I plan on this remote drive just living at my house on my home network. It would be behind a home Linksys router, using a 5Mbps / 384kbps broadband connection. Would this setup be sufficient if the incremental backups are relatively small? On average, I estimate the increments would likely be around 50MB. Even in extreme cases, I would expect that the backups would remain under 200MB. My ISP offers a 30Mbps / 2Mbs connection for an additional $20 / month. Based on my needs, and small budget, would this added cost be necessary or would the upgraded connection be a little overkill?

mclark1129
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  • Using numbers, how large are "relatively small" backups? What up and down speeds do you have ("middle tier broadband connection" tells us nothing about speed)? Also, if you have traffic limits how likely are you to exceed those limits, which might put a damper on the idea? – John Gardeniers Apr 27 '11 at 05:11
  • You're absolutely right, I edited my question to reflect more specific numbers. – mclark1129 Apr 27 '11 at 14:30
  • based on those numbers you will have no problems with the backups. For restores it would be more efficient to take the NAS to the office, due to the more restricted upload speed. I don't believe the higher speed connection is necessary or justified. – John Gardeniers Apr 27 '11 at 21:25

2 Answers2

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Id suggest Amazon S3 if the incremental backups are small. There are tutorials for creating backups in this fashion.

G.Martin
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  • At this point, we would rather manage the infrastructure ourselves than put it on the cloud. – mclark1129 Apr 27 '11 at 14:31
  • As an alternate if you have any Linux familiarity I'd suggest a DNS-323. I have one, convinced my small office to purchase one, and a coworker. One is modded to run torrents, another to run an intranet page (Lighttpd, PHP, MySQL). You can do just about anything with it within reason, so in terms of value and flexibility its awesome. – G.Martin May 12 '11 at 16:28
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I ended up going with the Synology drive and I can tell you that it is GREAT. Reasonably priced, great UI, and it's very easy to set up secured remote backups to it using DeltaCopy in Windows, or RSync if you are running *nix.

mclark1129
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