TrueNAS Offsite Backup

I am currently planning out my TrueNAS build and one thing I would like to have is an offsite backup.

I first looked at the cloud providers options but one year would cost more than 2 drives that are large enough plus a low end off the shelf NAS unit.

Since the offsite backup would only be storing data and nothing else, I plan to use a low end off the shelf unit that is networked together with Zerotier or Wireguard with the main NAS system.

For the Unit itself I am looking at the following 3 options as they are the cheapest from each major vendor:
Synology DS220j (5600 TWD, ~187 USD)
ASUSTOR AS1102T (4999 TWD, ~167 USD, Promo price)
Qnap TS233 (6299 TWD, ~210 USD)

I don’t know the pros and cons for each vendor as I have never used off the shelf NAS units before.

Ideally I would like to have the backup in a friend’s home that is located halfway around the world but that means 200~250ms of latency so the setup will have to play nicely with high network latency.

How well would a setup like this work? What software would be required for it to work? Looking for advice and feedback

Always good to calculate long term implications into the equation. :+1:

Judging from mentioning TrueNAS…you probably want to use zfs send for replication. This is insensitive to network latency (serialized stream of data) unlike e.g. rsync.

Bandwidth is also important. If you have to restore from backup, you don’t want to wait weeks to receive the snapshot. Sending the Initial snapshot requires some upload on your side too. Further incremental snapshots are much smaller and can work with lower bandwidth.
So a neighbor is much better than having it beyond driving distance. I prefer physical exchange of HDDs over low bandwidth continent spanning distance.

Easiest and fastest way is having ZFS on both ends. Your 3 listed options won’t do this. The absolute worst PC that can boot TrueNAS will be fine. TrueNAS also has an easy TrueNAS <-> TrueNAS replication GUI option that is damn simple.

If the offsite NAS isn’t ZFS you have to probably use rsync. You can still use zfs send and save it as a file on non-zfs filesystems, but that isn’t optimal if you want to keep multiple snapshots on the target (which you usually want). Single snapshot + incremental updates are still possible without creating multiple copies of data.

I can get around 140mbps max for sending to the remote location and whatever upload speed the remote location has back (<140mbps)

I would like the system to be as stable and maintenance free as possible. It has to have easy to access hard drives so that even a person that isn’t tech savvy can change it out. It also has to be small and quiet.

I could send the initial copy over at home before sending it off

Sure. replicate locally and send the HDDs to destination. Sending incremental only transfers the differences. May be 50GB per week or 1TB depending on how much you change on your pool. But still manageable amounts with private ISP uploads. And you can even do this hourly or every day to keep the chunks small and replication more up-to-date.

With 140mbps, it takes ~16 hours per TB (kCalc ftw!). And this assumes full utilization of bandwidth.
I don’t have any friends with 140mbps upload and I got 30TB in my pool. This is why I pointed out that particular focus on upload speed :slight_smile:

Depending on where in the world your friend is:

  • Refurbished 1L PC e.g. i3-7100T with 8 GB ram can be found for about 150, but you can maybe find slower used thin clients with Pentium Gxxxx for about 50
  • 18T or 20T USB3 drive - simple WD Elements or something like it.
  • Some kind of stick for installation

The software part is where it gets tricky, these aren’t servers, so power on after power failure would be useful. Most have it, but not all, need to remember to toggle.

There’s no IPMI, so unless your friend is software savvy, your best bet is to make sure you have usb boot preconfigured, and have a recovery drive for long term, but for short term your friend needs a monitor or TV and a keyboard and to act as “remote hands”.

Otherwise it’s probably best value for money, you can get a 20TB-60TB ZFS system for <$100 one off +HDD costs +yearly electricity.

You can pay your friend to get faster broadband =) they’d surely appreciate it.


Another option: instead of friend with a PC - participate in an economy like StorJ or Sia. You rent bytes to others and you use others bytes.