Fast cloud storage to backup 10TB Drobo 5N, NAS device.

April 29, 2017 12:48 PM

Hi, I need fast cloud storage temporarily to house 10TB of data from a Drobo 5N while I reformat it and download the data back to it afterwards. The computers are Macintosh. While I only need this temporarily, I will probably keep the service for backups of everything if I find a good one. I looked at Backblaze and liked it however they do not support NAS devices. Anyone know of a great service for that supports NAS and is priced well for large data sets?
posted by Studiogeek to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Coming across (very) nearly the same situation I went with backblaze anyway. Sort of. They offer a cloud storage service aside from their automated backup services: B2. There's a fair bit of infrastructure for supporting this kind of work and it's cheaper than S3.

That being said for the purpose stated here (local buffer, not future backups) It's faster, more reliable and nearly as cheap to buy 10TB worth of new drives and mirror locally.
posted by mce at 1:09 PM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

10TB on even a great connection is going to be rather a long time, and getting it cheaply is probably unlikely. Like mce, I wonder if local disk is going to be cheaper. Bonus, maybe you could sell the drives when you are done.
posted by advicepig at 1:43 PM on April 29, 2017 [2 favorites]

I use CrashPlan and it allows you to backup from NAS locations if required. Here's a guide from Drobo about setting it up.

Problem with the suggestion of buying 10TB drives for the local mirror during reformatting is you'll only have one existing copy of your data as you reformat the Drobo-- which isn't a great place to be. So you'll need the cloud process anyway, and just lean on the local drive as a speedup mechanism.

See if you can compress/spring-clean some of the data down so it'll fit on a smaller drive-- do the cloud backup, then use the smaller drive as the primary method/speedy version because upping and downloading 10TB is going to be a yawn-fest. It'd be useful having a spare HDD for when one of the NAS drives dies anyway so you can get the array happy again instantly.
posted by Static Vagabond at 6:58 PM on April 29, 2017

I used to use CrashPlan and now I'm switching to Amazon Cloud Drive ... both are "unlimited" and both will work with files accessible over a network share.

FWIW, your upload speed might slow you down far too much.
posted by Brian Puccio at 9:00 PM on April 30, 2017