A Look at ioSafe and Synology: Two Storage Solutions for Protecting Data From Any Disaster

[till213]

If I lose all the pictures, movies, and music, so what? It's not a big deal.

It's funny, because I would bet that pictures are the most important digital treasure to most people! Next to (scanned) documents, but I assume even documents are ranked way lower than personal pictures.

Everything else is just digital crap that can be re-bought (music, movies, software, ...).

 

[mw360]

When you have terabytes of data, the cloud is not a good option. I've whole DVD/Blue-ray collections that would take almost a year to upload to the cloud! LOL

Local solutions for audio and video enthusiasts is really the only way to go really.

I love my Synology DS1512+, I backup all my systems, I run a TeamSpeak 3 server, basic blog, file server, and VPN server to connect to my home network securely when traveling.. Extremely versatile NAS solution.

Cloud solutions eg Crashplan allow you to send in your first batch of data encrypted on a hard drive, and get it returned in the same way.

 

[zen]

I really wish MacRumors would mark advertising/promotional pieces as such.

 

[mw360]

My backup solution:

- Physical 2 TB harddrive connected to my iMac: Time Machine backup
- 8 TB (Raid 5) Synology NAS: Time Machine backup (alternates with harddrive above)
- Physical 4 TB harddrive connected to NAS: nightly backup (Synology Time Backup, historised like Apple Time Machine) of NAS data (photos, videos)
- Yearly backup to yet another external harddrive of everything, including the Time Machine backups. External harddrive is then stored at my workplace ("physically somewhere else").

Worst case scenario: my house burns down or gets flooded. In this case I would loose 1 year of data max. - and it needs a bit of discipline.

A Cloud based backup solution would be great, but with the massive amount of data that would cost me quite a bit! But I'll keep an eye on that (and the Synology NAS supports several such "Cloud based" backup providers "out of the box" (pun intended)).

Sounds like you only have 2-4 TB of actual data. There are unlimited cloud plans (limited to a single computer + external drives). You could get all your data into a cloud backup before your next annual backup comes around.

 

[LCB1980]

doesn't save you from Seagates

What's wrong with Seagates? I've just bought a 4TB Seagate external hard drive. Is it going to fail on me?

 

[snipper]

Serious fire

I don't even live in a wooden house, but if my house would ever burn down, it would probably burn for hours. My hard drive would not be +/- 20 minutes in an open fire, but more probably for half a day in a blazing oven. It would be much hotter and for much longer. Firefighters most often will let a place burn out if they can't save anything anyway. I doubt if this 'fireproof' HD will survive a real fire.

 

[Steve121178]

Unfortunately, managing a Synology NAS requires Java. And since it's done using a web browser, that means that you must have Java enabled in the browser.

I would much rather not have Java, and not have it enabled. But there's no choice, it seems. Maybe I could disable it in all browsers except one.

I have a Synology NAS and do not have Java installed and have no problems managed my NAS. I thought it used either Flash or HTML5.

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After Synology's poor handling of the Synolock ransomware, I will never get another Synology product. I lost so much data and my NAS is still a brick.

If you had been running the latest version of the software then you would have been totally unaffected by the exploit. Unfortunately it's your fault for not running the latest or a later version of the the software than the compromised version you had.

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No, I don't have myself to blame. I wasn't notified of an issue or a patch. I was away from my NAS for about 3 months and during that time I lost remote access to my files. Synology left my NAS vulnerable as that vulnerability should have never existed in the first place.

It's your fault for not applying patches.

If I leave my servers unpatched because I didn't attend them for 3 months or more and they were compromised whilst fixes were readily available, who's fault is that? Microsoft's or mine?

 

[mw360]

What's wrong with Seagates? I've just bought a 4TB Seagate external hard drive. Is it going to fail on me?

Here you go. Looks like you'll be just fine…

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

We like every one of the 4 TB drives we bought this year. For the price, you get a lot of storage, and the drive failure rates have been really low. The Seagate Desktop HDD.15 has had the best price, and we have a LOT of them. Over 12 thousand of them. The failure rate is a nice low 2.6% per year. Low price and reliability is good for business.

 

[foodog]

they specifically said, they think the cloud is great, but for anything above about a terabyte its easier to store it on a hard drive.

I use backblaze which gives me unlimited storage for 50 a year. I have 10T back up to it.

 

[attila]

You could say the Synology got burned by the competition!

 

[till213]

Sounds like you only have 2-4 TB of actual data.

Well spotted, Sir In fact, that is currently true. And even when I reach my 8 TB limit I do not plan to backup everything. E.g. I have my entire DVD collection converted to h264 - that was a lot of work, but it would not be the end of the world if I would loose all those movies, since I still have them physically on DVD.

Then there's software packages which I once downloaded, but could easily re-download. No need for backup.

Same goes for my music etc.

The only real treasure are really my photos (+ some other self-made/written documents), and with those I am far away from the 4 TB limit

 

[coolspot18]

doesn't save you from Seagates

I question the reliability of BackBlaze's surveys - I've had bad luck with all drive types.

In fact, I bought 4 WD Reds for a Synology NAS last year, 2 out of 4 were DOA.

I've had Seagate, Maxtor, IBM, WD drives all fail ... so for the average user, it's luck of the draw.

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Worst case scenario: my house burns down or gets flooded. In this case I would loose 1 year of data max. - and it needs a bit of discipline.

I do nightly backups from my Synology to an old Buffalo LinkStation NAS (photos and documents).

My photos are also uploaded nightly to Amazon Glacier with version control.

Every six months I copy to a portable USB hard drive.

So basically I can recover locally from the LinkStation, if not available I pull down from Glacier. Worst case, there is always the portable USB hard drive.

I use backblaze which gives me unlimited storage for 50 a year. I have 10T back up to it.

I won't rely only on BackBlaze ... there are reports of users having corrupt archives and not being able to recover the data. You should keep multiple copies - USB Drives + BackBlaze would be a good solution.

What's wrong with Seagates? I've just bought a 4TB Seagate external hard drive. Is it going to fail on me?

BackBlaze did a "study" and showed that <4TB Seagates had an extremely high failure rate. However, BackBlaze stresses these drives way beyond what a typical user will do ... so it's not 100% accurate.

 

[SaxPlayer]

Due to the way Apple implement Time Machine (remote disk image) and the inherent unreliable nature of wireless networks, NASs are pretty much useless for backups. Time Machine keeps prompting me to rebuild my backups every few months or so because of some disk image corruption.

I've raised this with Apple and yet they still haven't fixed this through at least three major OS X releases.

I suppose it depends on the device and firmware you're using. Under Yosemite connected to my Synology DS1513+ running DSM 5.1 Time Machine works just fine. The Synology happily backs up my Mac Pro and my MacBook. However, most of my data is on the Synology itself so I use their Time Backup package for an Apple-like Time Machine-ish backup solution on the NAS. The interface isn't great for it, however in DSM 5.2 Synology are introducing a much neater solution - arguably better than Apple's.

The Synology has a built in backup package on it too, so once a week I plug in an external USB drive and the NAS dumps all of its data to it (which is effectively all of my data and OS backups) and then I take that device around to a relative who lives a couple of miles away for safe keeping.

Backups like this are no problem so there's really no excuse. As it's scheduled to run at a particular time, I don't even have to turn the computer on or press any buttons. Just plug in the USB drive, leave it for an hour then unplug it again and put it in the box ready to take offsite. How easy is that?

 

[Fzang]

I have a copy of my WIP thesis in iCloud and a local Time Machine

 

[AndrewClarke]

Cloud solutions eg Crashplan allow you to send in your first batch of data encrypted on a hard drive, and get it returned in the same way.

...if you're in the US, Australia, or New Zealand. I use Crashplan and generally love it, but when I had a disaster with my local backup, I was stuck downloading my restore. That was a bummer, but a much smaller bummer than not having it at all.

 

[MacBH928]

The reason people prefer the cloud is because you never have to worry about drive failing. Its a very rare case that your HDD will be burned or physically damaged. But failing, viruses, malfunctions, ... etc is the problem.

This doesn't seem to solve this issue. As for accessibility you also don't have to worry if your router is working, are your wires connected, wifi is on, to access this from far.

Dropbox will always be there. There are paid people who work just to make sure you can access your files. Obviously, the downside is bandwidth and speed.

 

[69650]

I just use Dropbox which does it all in the background so I never have to worry about backups. Just save everything into my Dropbox folder which has 1TB of storage space. It's not ideal if you're backing up large files as the upload speed can be slow depending on your ISP. The vast majority of my hard drive is clogged up with iTunes downloads which I can always download again if the worst happened. If only Apple offered a proper cloud storage/streaming solution for iTunes I wouldn't need to download anything.

 

[crenz]

I'm really surprised nobody mentioned Arq. It's a great piece of software that will backup your Mac (or parts of it) to Amazon S3/Glacier, Google, FTP, Dropbox, ... I love it. I used to think I need the "neighbour" model (with a cloned Synology NAS), but now I'm happy to have a local Synology NAS, and an additional cloud backup.

1 TB on Google Drive Nearline will cost you 10 US$/month - I find that quite fair.

 

[Gizmotoy]

I nearly lost a bunch of pictures very early on in the digital camera days (saved by the harddrive-in-the-freezer trick). I'm super-paranoid now, and have multiple redundant systems in place. I'm in the target audience, but I find it hard to see how an ioSafe would fit in, though.

For example, we currently:
1) Have the original copies
2) Backup all machines to a centrally-housed local server using CrashPlan
3) Offsite backup all machines to CrashPlan Online
4) Offsite backup important documents from each machine to other family members using CrashPlan, and allow them to do the same to our server.

It seems to me like any offsite solution is preferable to a hardened local solution, presuming its frequently updated.

(As a note, really impressed with the CrashPlan app after trying a half dozen services. You could even do #2/4 above for free, they only charge for #3)

 

[Vidd]

Hey Guys

This is off topic, but can you save product reviews for publication on weekends?

I get disappointed the MacRumors feed goes silent on the weekends.

Saving reviews would be an easy way for you to generate news - and traffic - all week.

I really wish MacRumors would mark advertising/promotional pieces as such.

Is this a new thing? Macrumors gets a paid trip to a company somewhere and then basically produce a press release?

These aren't as much reviews as advertisements.

 

[darkmarc]

I suppose it depends on the device and firmware you're using. Under Yosemite connected to my Synology DS1513+ running DSM 5.1 Time Machine works just fine. The Synology happily backs up my Mac Pro and my MacBook. However, most of my data is on the Synology itself so I use their Time Backup package for an Apple-like Time Machine-ish backup solution on the NAS. The interface isn't great for it, however in DSM 5.2 Synology are introducing a much neater solution - arguably better than Apple's.

The Synology has a built in backup package on it too, so once a week I plug in an external USB drive and the NAS dumps all of its data to it (which is effectively all of my data and OS backups) and then I take that device around to a relative who lives a couple of miles away for safe keeping.

Backups like this are no problem so there's really no excuse. As it's scheduled to run at a particular time, I don't even have to turn the computer on or press any buttons. Just plug in the USB drive, leave it for an hour then unplug it again and put it in the box ready to take offsite. How easy is that?

There may also be issues related to your network setup. Time Machine uses Bonjour for looking up the backup target. If this cannot be resolved properly, it will prompt you to re-create the backup, even though the backup could be just fine. Bonjour uses mDNS (among other things) to resolve the registered hostname of the AFP server on your NAS, and I have found it to work much better if I make sure that all of my hosts in my network are properly registered in the same DNS-domain. This way, all hosts can use FQDN hostnames to resolve network services, such as AFP/TM.

 

[darkmarc]

I nearly lost a bunch of pictures very early on in the digital camera days (saved by the harddrive-in-the-freezer trick). I'm super-paranoid now, and have multiple redundant systems in place. I'm in the target audience, but I find it hard to see how an ioSafe would fit in, though.

For example, we currently:
1) Have the original copies
2) Backup all machines to a centrally-housed local server using CrashPlan
3) Offsite backup all machines to CrashPlan Online
4) Offsite backup important documents from each machine to other family members using CrashPlan, and allow them to do the same to our server.

It seems to me like any offsite solution is preferable to a hardened local solution, presuming its frequently updated.

(As a note, really impressed with the CrashPlan app after trying a half dozen services. You could even do #2/4 above for free, they only charge for #3)

CrashPlan is an excellent piece of software, agreed. I am also using CrashPlan Online to get an offsite backup running it in head-less mode on my Synology. There is, however, a pitfall involved if you like me are using TimeMachine for your local in-house backups, and then want to use CrashPlan Online to store those TM backups offsite.

The way that TM uses hard links in the file system to reduce the backup size, effectively making every incremental backup a full backup, is not at all compatible with CrashPlan. CrashPlan will instead resolve those links as being individual files, while in fact the hard link points to the same file, resulting in the TimeMachine backup becoming both inconsistent as well as MUCH larger. A 2 TB TimeMachine backup ended up becoming almost 8 TB in size when backing it up to CrashPlan Online when I tried this.

So sticking to CrashPlan only is a much better choice in this scenario.

 

[snipper]

CrashPlan

Another way to make off-site backups it to use CrashPlan to backup to a computer on a different location. This can be a Mac or PC, from you or a friend or on your work or family. It's free. You can offer the OP a backup on your computer in return. You probably already have an internet connection on both computers. Backups happen in the background on a low data rate. If you both computers are online on the same time on a regular base, this works fine.

Obviously not a workable solution if you want to backup huge files every day, or a TB video collection but for most people ± 100 GB is more than enough for their personal photo's and maybe a few years of email. A lot of people have a hard drive that has plenty of room they don't use anyway.

It even has a 'fast start' option where you can get a head start with a USB stick on the OP computer. You can pick which files and folders must and must not be backed up. Once set up, the backup is done automatically.

 

[SaxPlayer]

There may also be issues related to your network setup. Time Machine uses Bonjour for looking up the backup target. If this cannot be resolved properly, it will prompt you to re-create the backup, even though the backup could be just fine. Bonjour uses mDNS (among other things) to resolve the registered hostname of the AFP server on your NAS, and I have found it to work much better if I make sure that all of my hosts in my network are properly registered in the same DNS-domain. This way, all hosts can use FQDN hostnames to resolve network services, such as AFP/TM.

The Synology is Bonjour capable. They support Time Machine and give simple instructions on their website showing how to set it up. I've had it running for over a year and never had a problem with it.

 

[Gizmotoy]

CrashPlan is an excellent piece of software, agreed. I am also using CrashPlan Online to get an offsite backup running it in head-less mode on my Synology. There is, however, a pitfall involved if you like me are using TimeMachine for your local in-house backups, and then want to use CrashPlan Online to store those TM backups offsite.

The way that TM uses hard links in the file system to reduce the backup size, effectively making every incremental backup a full backup, is not at all compatible with CrashPlan. CrashPlan will instead resolve those links as being individual files, while in fact the hard link points to the same file, resulting in the TimeMachine backup becoming both inconsistent as well as MUCH larger. A 2 TB TimeMachine backup ended up becoming almost 8 TB in size when backing it up to CrashPlan Online when I tried this.

So sticking to CrashPlan only is a much better choice in this scenario.

My wife is a bit "clumsy" with her data. I have an unmentioned additional layer on her desktop, which is essentially Time Machine to an external drive. It exists in parallel with the CrashPlan backups, and the TM volume itself isn't backed up via CrashPlan (though all the same data is). This seems to work OK and allows for some of the benefits of TM while maintaining the essentially infinite granularity of backup version retention CrashPlan affords.