How do I get offsite remote backup for my NAS...on a home budget?

January 16, 2011 8:05 AM

I'm looking for the best customer-facing remote backup solution that can back up from my network NAS drive. A lot of the customer-facing solutions like MozyHome don't support the NAS drive. Also I'm wondering...with 1 terabyte to back up, won't it take months to upload?
posted by skylar to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

CrashPlan lets you back up to a number of things, specifically, a folder (ie, your NAS) in addition to the paid for backup at their datacenter. (which is how i have it set up...2 backups, one to CrashPlan servers and one to an external drive that just looks like a folder).

The interface is pretty straight forward (which is what I guess you mean by customer facing)
posted by Spumante at 8:17 AM on January 16, 2011

Response by poster: I want to back up FROM my networked drive. I can't seem to find a way to do that with CrashPlan. Is it possible?
posted by skylar at 9:37 AM on January 16, 2011

Could you use the program Goodsync to sync your files with space on Amazon S3 Service?

Goodsync is a very simple yet very powerful file synchronization tool, and it supports syncing files to and from network drive, Amazon S3 space and all sorts of other stuff.

I've heard quite a few of these online backup services rent space from Amazon S3 anyway.
posted by Diplodocus at 11:07 AM on January 16, 2011

Do you want to install the backup on the NAS itself? If so, what kind of NAS do you use? Many NAS devices can have additional software installed, for example s3sync to back up directly to an Amazon S3 bucket.
posted by me & my monkey at 11:19 AM on January 16, 2011

Jungle Disk will let you backup from your NAS, but the program itself needs to run on a desktop that's connected to the NAS; I'm not sure if you're looking for something that will run on the NAS device itself.

JD is good about managing long uploads for the first run (the length of time depends mostly on the speed of your he connection) and subsequent backups are incremental.
posted by camcgee at 12:53 PM on January 16, 2011

Response by poster: I'm happy for the application to run on my PC but the data must come from the NAS.
posted by skylar at 1:48 AM on January 17, 2011

Well, in that case, you have lots of choices. I'm using Jungle Disk, and it comes with some built-in backup/sync functionality. But you're not limited to that - you can use rsync or robocopy to keep files in sync between whatever network share you have on your NAS and your Jungle Disk buckets.

But the initial upload that you're talking about will take a lot of time. I don't have any experience with sending a disk to Amazon.
posted by me & my monkey at 9:00 AM on January 17, 2011

Here's the specific link for CrashPlan backing up a NAS (or other remote location) when you are on Windows: link

It's not as straight forward as clicking a button but the instructions seem pretty detailed.

Overview
CrashPlan does not support backing up mapped drives on Windows.
CrashPlan runs as a Windows service and therefore cannot access drives mounted by a user. This is an OS level restriction built into Windows.
If you would like to back up a mapped drive on Windows, this article describes an unofficial method for doing so. It is not supported by CrashPlan so proceed at your own risk.
posted by Spumante at 1:41 AM on January 20, 2011