Backing up a Nas to OneDrive

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lchiu7

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#251477 27-Jun-2019 09:06

I provide some support to a friend who has a small office network and a NAS which has all the important files. They are also a user of Office 365 with a terabyte of storage available.

I'd like to be able to backup them up to OneDrive and wondering if people have some suggestions on the best way to do this?

Currently as an interim measure what I do is run nightly task to copy all the important files of the NAS to a local PC which is running Windows 10 and a SSD boot drive. The amount of storage being backed up is probably no more than 10 gigabytes. The data it is copied to the OneDrive folder on the local PC and that of course synchronises it with the cloud continuously.

That works ok but I would prefer a process where I didn't have to make another copy of the NAS before backing it up to OneDrive. Do people have any ideas or experiences on a better way to do this? Thanks

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nutbugs

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#2265551 27-Jun-2019 09:14

What brand is the NAS? My Netgear has builtin support for a range of cloud services.

lchiu7

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#2265554 27-Jun-2019 09:21

nutbugs:
What brand is the NAS? My Netgear has builtin support for a range of cloud services.

It's a fairly old Acer brand NAS that does not have cloud support.

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snowfly

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#2265578 27-Jun-2019 09:23

As above, check if the NAS has built in software for cloud sync.

I have a QNAP NAS and use its "Cloud drive sync" software to automatically sync every day to Onedrive, over 450 GB stored in onedrive.

*Edit... I see you mention its an old NAS, do you have command line access? Perhaps try something like Rclone (rsync) for cloud services.

CYaBro

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#2265584 27-Jun-2019 09:28

If there's not that much data why not have the live working versions in OneDrive and they work on them from there?

Then setup a full PC backup using something like the free Veeam Endpoint backup and backup the images from that to the NAS?

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timmmay

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#2265629 27-Jun-2019 09:43

If you need a backup, rather than a copy, run Restic (best, command line, incremental backup) or CloudBerry backup (good, flexible, GUI) to backup to OneDrive. I don't know if Restic backs up there natively, but if it's mapped as a drive that's fine.

If you need a copy of files you can access directly rather than a backup, then use Cloudberry backup or something else (Robocopy?) to mirror it up there. CloudBerry can copy to just about any cloud storage.

If you map a drive, you risk having someone simply delete the backups. Versioning of files in cloud storage is also useful to prevent against losing data.

billgates

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#2265634 27-Jun-2019 09:50

Cloud storage services like Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive etc should not be used as a backup storage solution. They are sync services so if you delete a file or folder on your end device, it will reflect the same on OneDrive which is not how backups work or should work and you can imagine accidental deletion of all files/folders on end device and sync reflection of that on OneDrive.

You should look at using true offsite backup solutions like Crashplan, Backblaze etc that retain data and not delete it automatically as you delete it from your end device. Personally I use Cloudberry Pro application with Wasabi cloud to backup all my data for offsite.

Do whatever you want to do man.

shaned

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#2265637 27-Jun-2019 09:54

If you have another offsite location you can use ResilioSync to sync folders between machines. It has clients for an impressive number of OSs and NASs. For proper backup you'd also want to set up some kind of snapshot scheme on the target (lvm,btrs,zfs,git) to protect from accidental deletes or cryptolocker infections.

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lchiu7

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#2265641 27-Jun-2019 09:59

Thanks for the replies. I'm now looking at a Synology NAS and using their cloud backup software. Time to upgrade the NAS anyway. Probably least amount of work.

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lchiu7

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#2265667 27-Jun-2019 10:51

snowfly:
As above, check if the NAS has built in software for cloud sync.

I have a QNAP NAS and use its "Cloud drive sync" software to automatically sync every day to Onedrive, over 450 GB stored in onedrive.

*Edit... I see you mention its an old NAS, do you have command line access? Perhaps try something like Rclone (rsync) for cloud services.

Just took a look at our Rclone. That looks interesting.

But just like the current solution I'm going to need to have a PC running it.

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

wsnz

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#2265839 27-Jun-2019 18:08

Some NAS software supports a one-way copy, so you could use this for backing up to Onedrive.

You need to be careful that backups are actually executing and successfully completing, so I'd advise configuring any logging/notification service on the NAS if you can.

Another method would be to use a service like Crashplan, but not many run natively (and fully supported by the vendor) on the NAS so you'd need to configure another device to run the service.

I would also give some consideration to security requirements for your files. The native app's running on the NAS aren't necessarily going to provide you with much.

Jogre

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#2269079 3-Jul-2019 10:24

billgates:

Cloud storage services like Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive etc should not be used as a backup storage solution. They are sync services so if you delete a file or folder on your end device, it will reflect the same on OneDrive which is not how backups work or should work and you can imagine accidental deletion of all files/folders on end device and sync reflection of that on OneDrive.

You should look at using true offsite backup solutions like Crashplan, Backblaze etc that retain data and not delete it automatically as you delete it from your end device. Personally I use Cloudberry Pro application with Wasabi cloud to backup all my data for offsite.

Love the forum handle.

Depends on the version of Onedrive. OneDrive for Business has Version History and Recycle Bin options which would help you in a jiffy. The ransomware protection built into OneDrive and SharePoint uses this Version History along with bulk-file change/delete to help you if you get hit also (bonus info). I see where you're coming from on the retention side of things though as I had a QNAP backing up to Azure blob for a customer but we weren't getting retention on the backups so when a critical file corrupted, Azure had a copy of that file and we couldn't get a version of it before corruption (basically mirroring).

jonathan18

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#2269092 3-Jul-2019 10:52

Jogre:

Depends on the version of Onedrive. OneDrive for Business has Version History and Recycle Bin options which would help you in a jiffy.

Apologies if this comes across as a case involving grandmothers and eggs, and it could well be that the Business version of OneDrive is more comprehensive in how it manages version history etc, but even the personal edition offers version history and a recycle bin, both going back 30 days.

Again, not trying to suggest it's a proper "back-up solution", but it sure is a helpful feature available to anyone with OneDrive, and it's saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

(That said, for the bulk of the population for home use I imagine that OneDrive (and its equivalents) used properly can actually function 99% of the time as an adequate alternative to a proper back-up. It's relatively easy to set up, seamless, low-maintenance, affordable, and common [through O365 subs]. Of course, people should know and understand the limitations and risks, but surely it is always be better to have comprehensive cloud storage in place rather than nothing?)

Jogre

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#2269102 3-Jul-2019 11:03

jonathan18:

Again, not trying to suggest it's a proper "back-up solution", but it sure is a helpful feature available to anyone with OneDrive, and it's saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

Correct, and Known-Folder Move is awesome to help save bacon as well. I was manually redirecting Profile folders (Desktop, Docs, Pictures etc) into OD4B which saved a customer who'd moved 80GB of photos including wedding photos with no other backups.