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Synology or QNAP NAS. They collect backups from all computer in the house, encrypt them and ship the encrypted blobs to AWS Glacier. Synology in particular is

Synology or QNAP NAS. They collect backups from all computer in the house, encrypt them and ship the encrypted blobs to AWS Glacier. Synology in particular is a fantastic platform which does way more than a traditional NAS. It's quite polished personal cloud platform (way more so than FreeNAS) and includes hundreds of apps, even the backups into the cloud can be done in different ways. I also place a premium on the fact that Synology is a piece of hardware. The software comes built-in and taken for granted. What this means is that it's been sitting somewhere in the dark corner of my house since 2012, self-updating and not bothering me with upgrades or expired credit card / subscription, etc. It doesn't care if I run Linux/MacOS/Windows, it's just dumb storage that all of these OSes can backup to using built-in tools. Another tool I like is Resilio Sync [1], it's a cloudless Dropbox and it's perfect to sync /Documents and /Desktop across computers at home and at work. It's not a backup tool, but very much related, i.e. if I put a file on my desktop at work I know it will end up on Synology at home and eventually will get encrypted and backed up to Glacier, and yes, without any 3rd party servers involved. [1] https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ https://www.resilio.com/individuals/

danhorner 8y ago
+1 for synology NAS. The quality and frequency of updates has been high. I've used both rsync and Time-Machine based backups. And I too like that it's a hardware business model: I have the sense that my purchase(s) fund development of useful features, not creepy upsell opportunities. They had a scare several years back about a remote exploit. I think it has caused them to take security and updates seriously ever since.
hb3b 8y ago
Synology is great however I'd like to caution anyone considering their enterprise gear that they do not offer traditional 24/7 support. Regardless of which unit you purchase (in our case we purchased the most expensive RU model), all support tickets are triaged and prioritized equally, and there is no phone support (unless you scream loud).
- eltoozero 8y ago
  Get your reseller involved, and if you don't have one; get one. They do local seminars, you can just attend to become one yourself.
ValentineC 8y ago
To add on: Synology largely repackages open protocols into a fairly user-friendly package. Connections can be made over SMB/AFP/NFS, and their Synology Hybrid RAID for utilising different-sized disks is basically mdadm + LVM. I think it helps if anyone's concerned with avoiding vendor lock-in.
iooi 8y ago
I would stay away from QNAP, their quality is terrible. I had a QNAP QVR and it just reeked of insecurity. My friend has one of the smaller Synology boxes with 20TB and it is pretty nice. You can think of it as the Apple of the NAS systems out there, everything just works. However, if you like to tinker with your NAS a bit more, FreeNAS is excellent. It's pretty comforting running zfs over standard RAID, and you have a FreeBSD system where you can run anything you want in native jails.
- lsh 8y ago
  Agreed, QNAP os/distro/apps just feel shoddily made and maintained. If you maintain systems for a living you'll go berzerk trying to track down just exactly what it is doing and why and the constant (weekly?) firmware security updates. I haven't tried Synology in a long time. I'm looking to get my few TBs off of the QNAP and sell it in favour of something custom built.
eltoozero 8y ago
At least on Synology you can have your choice of storage vendors using the built in cloud sync app; it natively supports Rsync, AWS, Glacier, B2, Amazon, DropBox, Azure, whatever.
guiambros 8y ago
+1 to Synology. Love their hardware and software. Another advantage is that they're reasonably open (modules, plugins, etc), and the base operating system is GPL (but unfortunately not the UI / modules), so you can play with it when needed. I had to play with the source code a few times over the years, and having the ability to understand what the operating system is doing [1][2], or be able to do some hardcore recovery through the serial console [3] is pretty remarkable for a consumer storage product. (note: I wrote these posts 5-6 years ago, and the software has evolved a lot since them. I haven't checked the source code or used the serial console recently, so would love to hear thoughts if anyone has done it recently) [1] https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/ https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/ [2] https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet-password/ https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet-password/ [3] https://wrgms.com/recovering-a-failed-synology-diskstation-ds2xx-serial/ https://wrgms.com/recovering-a-failed-synology-diskstation-d...
maxo133 8y ago
How can you advise synology when their system doesn't even have FULL DISK ENCRYPTION? As longas it doesn't have it, i wont be even interested looking at their platform. Can you imagine it? NAS'es usually are targeted for business users, yet they dont have full disk encryption... For now i'm using QNAP, in terms of possible features i believe QNAP is little ahead (x86 cpu, virtualization, containers, fde). It has all what synology has + more. However their platform is badly constructed, most processes are esentially running as root user... You get like firmware update every 2 weeks. It doesn't mean that there are bugs tho. I'm running it for 2 years and never had a problem.

danhorner 8y ago

+1 for synology NAS. The quality and frequency of updates has been high. I've used both rsync and Time-Machine based backups. And I too like that it's a hardware business model: I have the sense that my purchase(s) fund development of useful features, not creepy upsell opportunities. They had a scare several years back about a remote exploit. I think it has caused them to take security and updates seriously ever since.

hb3b 8y ago

Synology is great however I'd like to caution anyone considering their enterprise gear that they do not offer traditional 24/7 support. Regardless of which unit you purchase (in our case we purchased the most expensive RU model), all support tickets are triaged and prioritized equally, and there is no phone support (unless you scream loud).

eltoozero 8y ago
Get your reseller involved, and if you don't have one; get one. They do local seminars, you can just attend to become one yourself.

ValentineC 8y ago

To add on: Synology largely repackages open protocols into a fairly user-friendly package. Connections can be made over SMB/AFP/NFS, and their Synology Hybrid RAID for utilising different-sized disks is basically mdadm + LVM. I think it helps if anyone's concerned with avoiding vendor lock-in.

iooi 8y ago

I would stay away from QNAP, their quality is terrible. I had a QNAP QVR and it just reeked of insecurity. My friend has one of the smaller Synology boxes with 20TB and it is pretty nice. You can think of it as the Apple of the NAS systems out there, everything just works. However, if you like to tinker with your NAS a bit more, FreeNAS is excellent. It's pretty comforting running zfs over standard RAID, and you have a FreeBSD system where you can run anything you want in native jails.

lsh 8y ago
Agreed, QNAP os/distro/apps just feel shoddily made and maintained. If you maintain systems for a living you'll go berzerk trying to track down just exactly what it is doing and why and the constant (weekly?) firmware security updates. I haven't tried Synology in a long time. I'm looking to get my few TBs off of the QNAP and sell it in favour of something custom built.

eltoozero 8y ago

At least on Synology you can have your choice of storage vendors using the built in cloud sync app; it natively supports Rsync, AWS, Glacier, B2, Amazon, DropBox, Azure, whatever.

guiambros 8y ago

+1 to Synology. Love their hardware and software. Another advantage is that they're reasonably open (modules, plugins, etc), and the base operating system is GPL (but unfortunately not the UI / modules), so you can play with it when needed. I had to play with the source code a few times over the years, and having the ability to understand what the operating system is doing [1][2], or be able to do some hardcore recovery through the serial console [3] is pretty remarkable for a consumer storage product. (note: I wrote these posts 5-6 years ago, and the software has evolved a lot since them. I haven't checked the source code or used the serial console recently, so would love to hear thoughts if anyone has done it recently) [1] https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/ https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/ [2] https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet-password/ https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet-password/ [3] https://wrgms.com/recovering-a-failed-synology-diskstation-ds2xx-serial/ https://wrgms.com/recovering-a-failed-synology-diskstation-d...

maxo133 8y ago

How can you advise synology when their system doesn't even have FULL DISK ENCRYPTION? As longas it doesn't have it, i wont be even interested looking at their platform. Can you imagine it? NAS'es usually are targeted for business users, yet they dont have full disk encryption... For now i'm using QNAP, in terms of possible features i believe QNAP is little ahead (x86 cpu, virtualization, containers, fde). It has all what synology has + more. However their platform is badly constructed, most processes are esentially running as root user... You get like firmware update every 2 weeks. It doesn't mean that there are bugs tho. I'm running it for 2 years and never had a problem.