Using iSCSI to trick Backblaze into thinking my NAS is a local drive?

[Delgado]

I'm in the process of moving from a direct-attached array to a 10Gbe Asustor NAS. All was going well until I realized that my cloud backup provider (Backblaze) doesn't support backups from network drives unless you upgrade your subscription to a metered one that would be 10X the cost for my current amount of data (~14TB).

 

After reading about iSCSI and SANs, it seams to me like I could create a local logical drive in Windows using the NAS's volume as an iSCSI LUN and trick the Backblaze uploader into thinking it's a local drive. I'm a little worried about reliability though - does anyone know if there are things I should look out for? The Asustor AS4004T NAS is connected peer-to-peer via an 10GbE NIC on my editing machine.

Am I crazy or would this work and potentially save me $50USD/mo on a B2 Cloud subscription?

[AbydosOne]

26 minutes ago, Delgado said:

Am I crazy or would this work and potentially save me $50USD/mo on a B2 Cloud subscription?

My hesitation would be that iSCSI creates a block device, so unless your host computer can (at best) recognize the NAS's underlying filesystem, it probably won't work.

 

Alternate theory: mounting a SMB share to an NTFS mount point inside of an existing drive? (I don't know to what lengths BB goes to prevent work-arounds)

 

All that said, breaking terms and conditions can lead to termination of accounts, so... tread lightly?

[BrinkGG]

31 minutes ago, Delgado said:

I'm in the process of moving from a direct-attached array to a 10Gbe Asustor NAS. All was going well until I realized that my cloud backup provider (Backblaze) doesn't support backups from network drives unless you upgrade your subscription to a metered one that would be 10X the cost for my current amount of data (~14TB).

 

After reading about iSCSI and SANs, it seams to me like I could create a local logical drive in Windows using the NAS's volume as an iSCSI LUN and trick the Backblaze uploader into thinking it's a local drive. I'm a little worried about reliability though - does anyone know if there are things I should look out for? The Asustor AS4004T NAS is connected peer-to-peer via an 10GbE NIC on my editing machine.

Am I crazy or would this work and potentially save me $50USD/mo on a B2 Cloud subscription?

if it does work, my guess is they'll work to remove that loophole fairly quickly once they see it. I wouldn't recommend it as a long term solution. 

[Delgado]

1 hour ago, AbydosOne said:

My hesitation would be that iSCSI creates a block device, so unless your host computer can (at best) recognize the NAS's underlying filesystem, it probably won't work.

 

Alternate theory: mounting a SMB share to an NTFS mount point inside of an existing drive? (I don't know to what lengths BB goes to prevent work-arounds)

 

All that said, breaking terms and conditions can lead to termination of accounts, so... tread lightly?

I can enable NFS in Windows and the NAS to allow it to read EXT4 natively, but my understanding is that i can format the logical drive to NTFS and share it back to the NAS using SMB. I might have that messed up though... I just started researching this last night.

 

Re terms and conditions, they do allow the backup of external USB and thunderbolt devices like Drobos and other DAS devices. I don't see why a CAT7 cable would be any different than a USB cable when the filesystem is managed locally?

1 hour ago, BrinkGG said:

if it does work, my guess is they'll work to remove that loophole fairly quickly once they see it. I wouldn't recommend it as a long term solution. 

It's quite possible - I'm just hoping to avoid an enterprise class solution for my home needs. I know other cloud backup solutions have native NAS apps!

[Delgado]

So I set up a temporary iSCSI LUN to see if Backblaze worked and to compare performance against just using a standard mapped network drive. Good news on both fronts! The uploader sees the drive as a local drive, and so does CrystalDiskMark:
 

 

Are there any disk benchmark apps that can use for an apples-to-apples comparison with a network share? 

[EDIT] Enabling jumbo frames seemed to help a bit, with the sequential stuff anyway:

[doommood]

From what I found, there should be no problems with the backups. Some users had this for a while
https://misdirectedrequest.wordpress.com/2017/12/25/synology-iscsi-pc-backblaze/

And the performance is quite well. Hopefully, Backblaze does not throttle the upload speed
https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/7yhnlm/large_files_upload_very_slowly/

[Delgado]

17 hours ago, doommood said:

From what I found, there should be no problems with the backups. Some users had this for a while
https://misdirectedrequest.wordpress.com/2017/12/25/synology-iscsi-pc-backblaze/

And the performance is quite well. Hopefully, Backblaze does not throttle the upload speed
https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/7yhnlm/large_files_upload_very_slowly/

My upload speed with Shaw Cable is pretty abysmal, but all of the data already exists on Backblaze anyway so I don't have to re-upload the new array. Pretty happy with it so far!

[Zakk8]

On 6/22/2020 at 12:29 AM, Delgado said:

My upload speed with Shaw Cable is pretty abysmal, but all of the data already exists on Backblaze anyway so I don't have to re-upload the new array. Pretty happy with it so far!

Ik this is an old thread, but does this still work?

[Delgado]

1 hour ago, Zakk8 said:

Ik this is an old thread, but does this still work?

Yes, with no issues whatsoever. I still edit photos and videos off of this setup with all of my spinning drives in another room. Its so much better than having loud, vibrating 7200rpm datacenter drives in my tower beside me.

[corecore]

On 11/22/2021 at 9:18 PM, Delgado said:

Yes, with no issues whatsoever. I still edit photos and videos off of this setup with all of my spinning drives in another room. Its so much better than having loud, vibrating 7200rpm datacenter drives in my tower beside me.

I love this idea.  I've done some Googling but don't know how to start with it.  I'm on Mac, does anyone know how I would do this?  Was previously backing up all computers to backblaze with target disk mode, which mounted as a local drive, but has been replaced on new M1 chip macs.  Now I can only see them as network drives so I need to figure out how do this.  Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[Delgado]

3 hours ago, corecore said:

I love this idea.  I've done some Googling but don't know how to start with it.  I'm on Mac, does anyone know how I would do this?  Was previously backing up all computers to backblaze with target disk mode, which mounted as a local drive, but has been replaced on new M1 chip macs.  Now I can only see them as network drives so I need to figure out how do this.  Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Not sure as I'm not a Mac guy - on Windows its an OS-level thing, but a quick Google search for "iSCSI on OSX" shows u need to download an "iSCSI Initiator" and you should be good to go.

[gambit2552]

On 6/18/2020 at 12:27 PM, Delgado said:

So I set up a temporary iSCSI LUN to see if Backblaze worked and to compare performance against just using a standard mapped network drive. Good news on both fronts! The uploader sees the drive as a local drive, and so does CrystalDiskMark:
 

 

Are there any disk benchmark apps that can use for an apples-to-apples comparison with a network share? 

[EDIT] Enabling jumbo frames seemed to help a bit, with the sequential stuff anyway:

How did you set up the ISCSI to your drobo?

[Delgado]

2 hours ago, gambit2552 said:

How did you set up the ISCSI to your drobo?

I didn't - I got rid of the drobo 5C because it was horrendously slow and corrupting itself regularly, and replaced it with a 10GbE enabled Asustor AS4004T NAS device. I don't think a drobo would let you have access to the filesystem like this.