Headless Synology NAS Cloud Backup

If you’re storing all of your creative industry business data to a Synology NAS, you probably already backup locally to an external drive (or a series of external drives). However, in the event of a local disaster at your home or office (fire, flood, theft) you still need an offsite cloud backup.

Most creative professionals have data backup requirements that far exceed consumer-level users (and most businesses as well). In my case, I have roughly 5 TB of data that is growing by nearly another TB every year (no matter how hard I try to delete my sh!t and unused files). Up until recently, there were many unlimited cloud backup solutions available. Now, most cloud backup plans seem to top out around 1TB before substantial fees are added for additional space. Further, most of these applications are designed to backup individual computers (and many are not even compatible with network storage), and they must be run from an application on a specific computer (the head). Up until recently, I used SOS Online Backup to backup my Synology NAS to the cloud. However, since SOS canceled unlimited backup and the pricing became unreasonable, I was forced to find an alternative solution. While I was generally happy with the SOS backup app, it was always an annoyance that I had to keep my desktop computer running simply to run a cloud backup on my Synology NAS, which is already always running and has its own built-in operating system and suite of applications: DiskStation Manager. Since I was looking for a new cloud backup solution anyway, I wanted one that did not rely on a separate computer and could run headless, directly from the NAS itself. In my opinion, this is a much more reliable option and drastically simplifies network backups. While the selection is much more restricted, Synology does offer a number of supported headless NAS backup applications. In addition, DiskStation also supports a number of third-party headless backup applications for the following services:

Acronis True ImageArchiware P5Data Deposit BoxElephant DriveIDriveNAKIVO Backup and Replication

Synology C2 Cloud Backup

Synology C2 cloud backup is built into Synology’s DiskStation management platform, so it is very easy to setup using Synology’s Hyper Backup application (which you likely already use for local backups). Here is a complete tutorial for setting up Synology C2 cloud backup. Here is how Synology describes C2 cloud backup: A few important features of C2 backup are client-side encryption (your data is encrypted as it’s uploaded), hourly backups and backup rotations. C2 offers data recovery through Synology’s Hyper Backup application – however, this requires a functioning Synology NAS, which you may no longer have after a disaster. A web based application is also available for recovery, although reports indicate that it may only be possible to recover one file at a time. If you’re talking about your entire NAS, this obviously isn’t feasible. If you’d like more information on Synology’s C2 Cloud backup solution, this article goes into much more depth.

While the Synology C2 cloud backup is built right into the Synology DiskStation Manager Hyper Backup application, the Amason S3 Glacier application is a native Synology app and is also included with DiskStation Manager (just download from Package Centre).

Since this article is focused on creative industry professionals, we’ll skip any consumer level plans. Synology C2 cloud backup pricing is listed as 69.99 Euros per terabyte (TB) per year, or roughly $6.60 USD per TB per month.

Other Considerations

This is a very serious consideration for many users, and it is no accident that Synology uses European Union privacy laws as a key marketing point.

Conclusion

I think that either service is the top choice for cloud backup of a Synology NAS, and a much better option than running a backup application on a separate computer. But what would you choose? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think!