NAS over internet (DDW-RT?)

Complete noob to networking.

 

I am wanting to build a NAS from old PC parts so that I can store back-ups on from PC's within the house. But I also want my Dad at his house to have access to the NAS to back up his computer.

 

Backups will only be of documents and pictures so 1TB in RAID-1 will be more than enough.

Am I right in thinking that at my end (where the NAS will be) that I need my router to be able to run DDW-RT and then my Dad (at his house) will be able to see the NAS at his end? Like a network drive

No, you won't need to use dd-wrt or anything like that to do this. 

There are several ways you can do this, I'll give you some ideas which you can look up and find some guides on which will be much easier than me trying to explain how to set them Up. 

You could use sftp, it's basically a secure version of ftp. So you run an sftp server on your computer and connect to it from your dad's. 

You could set up a VPN server, when your dad connects to it it will be just like being on the local network. I recommend openVPN but if your not too worried about security then PPTP might be easier. 

Bittorrent sync us really easy to set up, if your dad backs up to a folder on his computer you could use bittorrent sync to automatically sync that folder with one on your computer. 

Whichever method you choose you will need to open and forward the necessary ports to your computer on your router. 

I would do the VPN setup, I use OpenVPN on my network and it works fairly hood

One this to remember if you go the VPN route is that by default the VPN connection will act as the default internet connection, so your dad will be tunnelling his internet connection through yours. This is good if you're connecting from a public network hut probably not what you want in this situation. So make sure when you're configuring this that you don't assign a gateway address to VPN clients, this should prevent them from tunnelling their internet connection and just tunnel the LAN traffic. 

Sorry, I'm not at home so I can't tell you specifically what you need to change but just keep it in mind and you should be able to figure it out. 

Thanks for the replies.

I'll be hosting on Windows 7 and my Dad is still on XP - Not sure if this matters.

He has a good internet connection so I really only need him to see a HDD as a network attached drive, then use his own internet for internet.

Check this out

http://www.duplicati.com/home

This also looks pretty good, I use bittorent sync to sync files with my phone and it works amazingly well. Adapting it for backup would be awesome for backing up over the internet

http://nocwiz.com/2013/09/11/creating-personal-cloud-backup-using-bittorrent-sync-backup/