I’m planning to buy a NAS to store backups from several computers. My plan is that the backups will be sent over the Internet to NAS. From what I can understand I have the following backend options:
SFTP
WebDAV
In order to allow an user on the NAS to use SFTP, the user needs to be in the admin group (checked Synology and asustor). That is not something I would like to do. Do you any way to work around this?
I used to own a few Synology’s in the past; and as far as I remember, to log in via SSH you have to be in the admin group, but SFTP was available to anyone. Unfortunately, Synology’s SFTP is all sorts of broken so I would not trust it in the first place, even if it worked. There is a lot of closed source black box code Synology injected in the open-source libraries they built upon, (including in OpenSSH authentication paths, I’m not even kidding – see their source of source forge. Of course, they did not publish the shim layer itself, only calls to it they made from OpenSSH. Remember TiVo? All the benefits of peer review software are out of the window right there. You might say – but Synology software engineers know what they are doing. .No. No, they don’t. I’m sure of it. That’s why I no longer have any Synology anything. /rant). The fewer Synology software you use – the better.
Yes; you can launch a modern OpenSSH server in the Docker container if you want to use SSH.
Add to list S3 via minio.
WebDAV is just a handful of extensions to HTTP, and so it is something that will be handled by a web server. (Yeah, Synology mangled webserver). It’s going to be very slow. You can use it as a last resort if no other protocol is available, but it wasn’t designed for bulk storage and/or to manage millions of files Duplicacy will create; it was intended for shared collaboration on a handful of documents.
Not sure where is it marked as a beta – it exists for two decades at least.
So to summarize:
My first choice would be OpenSSH running in the container on docker on your NAS. This will provide several benefits:
Isolation: you can mount only a dedicated folder to host backups to the container
You fully control the configuration
No Synology shenanigans (search this forum for “Synology sftp”…)
Backup data is portable. You can move that folder easily elsewhere.
My second choice would be Minio. S3 is better suited for bulk storage. The disadvantage is that the data will be stored in an opaque database, so you will have to always keep using Minio, and I view it as an unnecessary complexity layer. In the LAN on DS1618+ SFTP was at least 2.5 faster than Minio (not that it matters for backup – but it does matter for resources utilization on your NAS)
WebDAV would not be on my list of choices
Another edit: Why to then NAS though? Why not to a cloud destination? E.g. Google Workspace account? Or Backblaze? It is very expensive to host data onsite. You would need to buy hardware, and then keep buying drives forever, maintaining it, etc. Commercial datacenter will do that better and cheaper due to scale.
Small nas from scratch will not be much cheaper than commercial (TrueNas, or Synology) - you need quality hardware with ECC ram support and enough of it for ZFS or BTRFS, and then it is just an upfront cost anyway; it’s irrelevant in the long run; the recurring cost of drive replacement and your time investment of maintaining it however will be the same. On premise storage makes sense if you need LAN access to large amounts of data and have slow internet connection.
Since you are planning to backup via internet — that benefit is irrelevant and you are left with only drawbacks of that solution: high cost and low reliability.
How much data are we talking about here? Over 2TB? over 3TB?
@gchen — should the “beta” there be removed perhaps? It’s been a while webDAV was supported.
So it’s about $5/Month in hot storage costs. The break even point for a nas will be way past its useful life, even if durability and availability was the same. It isn’t, so you would need at least one more remote nas, and this doubles the cost right there.
I based my recommendation on this stated intended purpose:
But even with this (or, perhaps, especially with this):
the advise would not change.
Are you planning to do it just because you will have nas and might as well use it for other tasks it wasn’t designed for to justify its existence, or because you already rely on those services elsewhere and want to migrate form the commercial cloud to self hosting?
Web server would be better handled by cloud web hosting providers. Static websites — more so. Database… where are you running it now? Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and many other smaller players all offer compute, data storage and processing services, including rather capable free tiers. And neither of those should be handled by nas to begin with. You maybe thinking of application sever; but in spite of what nas vendors tell you their devices are not application servers, they are barely capable of hosting storage, for a variety of reasons.
To be clear, I have nothing to gain from dissuading you from making the expensive mistake of buying a nas for backups (let alone running other stuff); it’s just I went through exact same line of thinking few years back and few thousands dollars later (some of upfront cost I recovered selling that hardware on eBay, but i will never get back time wasted making all that work, filing bugs, working around issues, and generally becoming an expert on dealing with Synology’s crappy software — and they are one of the better ones out there. I’d rather spend my time on something else) today I ended up using cloud services for everything. Someone else deals with issues and makes everything work. I don’t think my story is unique. Anyway, it’s just a friendly advice because I have seen how it ends; feel free to ignore of course
