It’s kinda wild that for home NAS backups it’s still cheaper to buy a low-end Synology with a big-ass HDD, put it somewhere != home, and backup to it.
Famously-cheap Backblaze B2 is $144 / yr for 2 TB. A Synology DS124 is less than $200 and 4 TB HDDs are less than $100. Two years & you’re ahead. Add more TBs & it’s even faster. Of course, it’s even cheaper if you’re willing to fiddle w/ Raspberry Pis.
Holds up if you include electricity bills: backup NASes can be switched off most of the time.
@hynek I have yet to use B2, but I'm ~4 years into using their $99 computer backup plan on a ~2 TB system (60% full). Maybe because I'm not using a NAS, it seemed more problematic than using their backup solution.
@hynek what “not at home” location do you factor in here? Might work if you already have a second home, otherwise you need a very good friend you trust enough to host a backup and have fast internet speeds that they’re willing to let you use overnight for backups plus hosting a noisy NAS (even if off most of the time) somewhere safely. Just curious if there’s something I’m missing since otherwise seems good if you can do it
@jerr0328 Well, family wants tech support so time to give back! Also I didn’t say it’s a universal solution for everybody, but that it’s still cheaper.
@hynek For most users I would recommend Google One (100$/year for 2TB) or iCloud+ (120$/year for 2TB) anyway! Can be shared over multiple accounts, syncs between devices and you never loose a picture of your mugs again.
@quentinpradet sure, but that’s orthogonal. The uv video project ist over 200 GB big – I’m not gonna upload it to iCloud. I’m assuming one NEEDS a NAS.
@quentinpradet Because it’s even more expensive, only allows 2 TB -> 6 TB (I need 2 TB for family day-to-day), and AFAICT isn’t supported as a NAS backup target by the common NAS vendors.
@hynek I don’t disagree on the general principle and think this is a good solution for many people.
But what you didn’t factor in is a UPS, filesystem reliability, physical risk to the NAS, disks dying, potential offsite restore of data… there’s IMHO a lot more to it.
@fallenhitokiri yeah but you need NOTHING of that for a private NAS backup and it’s exactly what you pay Amazon, Hetzner, B2 etc for with the result that the rounded number of consumers with offsite backups for their home NAS is 0.
If you want more short-term redundancy, a two-disk DS 223J is also sub-$200.
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