So I got a new Synology NAS (yay!) and have moved my video and photo collections to it and they a...

[G+_Tyson Vanover]

So I got a new Synology NAS (yay!) and have moved my video and photo collections to it and they are serving up to the house and backing up to Glacier just fine. But now I want to expand out a bit.

 

I really like carbonite and crashplan, is there a way to set up a client on my desktops that will do version controlled automatic syncing of specific folders to my NAS? We had a CryproLocker problem a while ago, so mounting a folder for backups problematic. And the auto backup on change is really convenient.

[G+_Eddie Foy]

So you want to make a in house carbonite/crashplan? (ie: not using those services, but the NAS as the BU location) The time backup app might work.

Doesn't Windows 8 (and I think 7) have versioning backup? Shadow copy or something like that?

 

Without mounting?  You might want to go the other way, have the NAS pull the files.  This way the NAS mounts to the desktop. (no new drive letter to get cryptolockered)

 

(Sorry. I live mostly in a Mac, and use CarbonCopyCloner, SuperDuper, and TimeMachine.  Yes, all three.)

[G+_Ben Reese]

I've seen CrashPlan for the Synology, but don't know if it works as a destination or just a client. Would be interesting to find out though.

 

Windows has a backup utility but I haven't looked into versioning. I'm pretty sure it will do a shadow copy of the boot drive though - I should find out.

[G+_Tyson Vanover]

Heh, part of why I got the NAS is to not have to have so many licenses for crashplan in the house.  I want to limit them to laptops, not desktops.

[G+_Ben Reese]

CrashPlan is free unless you want to backup to their servers. Are you trying to backup the computers to the NAS or the NAS to the cloud?

[G+_Tyson Vanover]

computers to nas.  Really, crashplan is free?  I'll dig into my settings and see what it takes to change the target.  the biggest concern is how to give the backup write but not overwrite access.

[G+_Brian Goossen]

Tyson please post if you find a way to solve this. I'm wanting to do this exact same thing in my house. Thanks!

[G+_Tyson Vanover]

The Synology Cloud Station client running on your desktop will do this with a few caveats.  Also, I am still experimenting on how the versioning is being captured by Glacier.

 

One, you cannot mount your home directory on the NAS, as the Cloud Station backup is stored in your NAS account's home directory.  If you do this then all your backups are subject to cryptolocker.

 

Two, Cloud Station is a sync client, so if you use the same NAS account on two different clients it will sync between them.  You may want this behavior.  But if you don't then you need to set up unique accounts for every computer+user combination you want to back up.

 

Three, the backup process only works when you are logged in.  So you cannot set up Cloud Station on your desktop's Admin account, mark the User folders to backup then have it do the backups when you are logged in as a user.  That means setting up Cloud Station for every user account, and not doubling them up on the same machine as it will duplicate all data across accounts.

 

With all of these accounts (and the mix of windows machines) my next project will be finding the smallest, lowest power, windows machine I can run AD and LDAP services on to try and manage and distribute all these accounts.

[G+_Ben Reese]

Tyson Vanover?, you can probably get by with running the Cloud Station application as Administrator via scheduled tasks.

 

As for a cheap Windows machine to run AD services, I'd expect any Core2Duo or newer machine to work fine. If you have a student email address (I think any .edu account will work), you can get Windows Server free from Dreamspark. You can test with a VM if you don't want to purchase dedicated hardware.