Back up my network drive with fluffy clouds!

August 8, 2013 8:46 AM

I have a 2Tb network hard drive with a lot of important photos etc. which I'd like to backup to the cloud in a Mozy/Crashplan manner ie updated files are automagically uploaded to the cloud without me having to worry about it. What services will *actually* let me do this? I've paid for at least one service which actually refuses to connect to my NAS drive... (a Netgear Stora, if you need to know this!)
posted by almostwitty to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

You can try Crashplan for free for a month to confirm whether it will see your drive. You'll know right away, since you identify the drives/volumes you want to seed to the cloud.

I am in a similar place, trying to find a home in the cloud for about two TB of photos (and more terabytes of other stuff). Based on my experience so far, it will probably take weeks (and maybe a month!) to see the whole thing.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 8:50 AM on August 8, 2013

Looks like that Netgear has a premium service for Stora users to backup their cloud either by ftp or folder synch. See Here
posted by bleucube at 8:52 AM on August 8, 2013

Response by poster: @Admiral Haddock - alas Crashplan doesn't seem to guarantee coverage for NAS drives on a PC

@bleucube - alas, that's only syncing to multiple folders on a PC...
posted by almostwitty at 8:55 AM on August 8, 2013

I use Crashplan with a NAS drive. I mount it using the method described on their website, and it works great. It is technically unsupported, however.
posted by Jairus at 8:57 AM on August 8, 2013 [2 favorites]

alas Crashplan doesn't seem to guarantee coverage for NAS drives on a PC

That's why I was noting that you can try it for free for a month to see if it works. You get access to the full service to try it out.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 9:40 AM on August 8, 2013 [1 favorite]

The Amazon S3 service is fairly inexpensive and they have an Import service where you can mail them your drive rather than uploading the data which could take several days / weeks.
posted by davidvanb at 10:26 AM on August 8, 2013

I think the issue with crashplan is that it has to back up the NAS by mounting it as a volume on some computer that's being backed up by crashplan. So if the network goes down or the NAS gets disconnected it won't get backed up. Thus the disclaimers. But otherwise it should work fine.
posted by GuyZero at 10:43 AM on August 8, 2013

Jairus: "I use Crashplan with a NAS drive. I mount it using the method described on their website, and it works great. It is technically unsupported, however."

same here, this has worked for me so far (~1 1/2 years)
posted by Hairy Lobster at 2:23 PM on August 8, 2013

For what it is worth, it looks like there are ways to run additional software on the Stora. I've run Crashplan on very similar hardware, and while it wasn't particularly challenging, it was a project with a few challenges I had to work through. Furthermore, while it is possible to run Crashplan on a device with 128MB of RAM, like the Stora, I think you really need 256MB when you are dealing with a larger number of files.

Pretty much any off-device Windows-based backup solution for a NAS is going to have the same issue and similar workarounds to Crashplan.

Amazon S3, suggested above, isn't a solution for the automatic backup the OP requested. It could be part of a solution, though, but last I looked, Crashplan was more economical and/or offered much faster recovery than Amazon's cheapest option (Amazon Glacier). They also let you pay an extra fee to seed the backup with a hard disk.
posted by Good Brain at 4:24 PM on August 8, 2013