@fishingfromakay
The key to any backup strategy is automation and implementing a 3-2-1 backup strategy. Anything that requires manual intervention should be avoided, e.g. manually connect up an external drive and copy files.
Most, if not all, NAS appliances support TM or you can DIY your own NAS with enterprise class open source NAS software from
https://www.truenas.com Keep in mind RAID is not a backup, RAID is resiliency. Also, never expose any NAS directly to the internet unless you want to be hit with ransomware.
3-2-1 is:
3 - copies (original, plus 2 copies)
2 - different type of backup media
1 - offsite
This definition explains the 3-2-1 backup strategy, a methodology for backing up and recovering data, and its three steps, applications and shortcomings.
www.techtarget.com
I use Google Drive 15GB free tier for financial, legal, and mission critical files only. TrueNAS has built in support for any number of cloud storage providers, and will encrypt the data in transit and at rest.
This is a good solid solution right here. I am doing something similar:
- 2 Macs, each with their own separate external disk for TM backups. Those go offsite.
- Each Mac is also backed up to my NAS, via TM.
- My NAS (Synology DS213J) is backed up to two separate drives via HyperBackup; one of those drives also goes offsite.
Yes, it may sound redundant, but that is the idea. The key is to have redundancy in case of any catastrophe. That redundancy could be anything as simple as a disk failure to something as complex as fire or flood or any disaster that takes out your house or wherever the hardware resides. In my case, if I lost my house (read: onsite), including my NAS and Macs, after purchasing new hardware, I could recover my data from those disks that are offsite. Doubly so for my NAS; if I recover that, then by extension I would also recover the latest TM backups of my Macs in addition to any other data I have.
So I get resiliency from my NAS without relying on RAID as being my redundancy, multiple targets for my backups which become multiple sources for my restore, plus gives me more avenues to not only cover my bases in case a disk used for backups fail, but also to test my backup processes.
One last thing on this: taking a backup is not the be all/end all here.
You are never as secure in your backup strategy as your latest RESTORE. You can take as many backups as you want; but all of them are useless unless you can restore from them. If your restore fails, then all of your backups are wasted space. So you have to test those by restoring every so often. For me, every time a major MacOS release comes out, I wait until the full installer is available, take one last backup onto an external disk and/or my NAS, blow my Mac away, install using the full installer on a USB stick, and either use the NAS or that external disk as my source for a TM restore or restore through Migration Assistant. If that works, then my backup strategy is sound. Everyone backing up their data needs to think of similar.
In case you haven't seen (TidBITS is a Mac troubleshooting and advice site that the owner of MacInTouch, a long running troubleshooting site, sent his online community to when he changed MacInTouch into a blog):
"For a few years now, I’ve been wanting to move more of my data out of the cloud and onto my own local storage. I needed a better solution for local storage for this effort because my old system consisted of multiple external hard drives attached to my iMac, which was messy and made it hard to access files from other devices."
In an effort to create a centralized but local place to store all his data, Josh Centers bought a Synology DS 920+. So far, the investment has been worth it for him, but it may be more expense and trouble than it’s worth for you.
tidbits.com
This is the exact reason why I went with a NAS instead of anything Cloud based. First comes the potential legal issues that come with storing any data in the Cloud. Second, one has to weigh the options of sensitivity of the data being stored versus the convenience of having access to that data. Most people don't think it's a problem, but again most don't realize how much data they store in cloud-based services: PCI (credit card) data, PHI (Personal health) data, PII (personal identifiable) data, etc. If those are stored on your Mac or PC, and you back that up to the cloud, that data is in the cloud; any breach at that cloud service exposes that data. This is why people have been up in arms about passwords being exposed and using cloud-based SaaS providers like Dashlane, LastPass, etc., which both have had breaches.
And I won't even get into the issue of being protected against searches and seizures of your data at those cloud providers, as I've already brought that up in many a thread (the TLDR: you don't have any protected rights against it).
Because of that, I bought my own NAS (I got tired of building servers to do it), don't have it exposed publicly, and use the cloud services on that to have data copied between any Macs or PCs that connect to it.
BL.
