Any good solutions for DIY offsite backups?

[Vulture78]

Hello,  I currently have a NAS (OpenMediaVault) setup at home for household backups.  The NAS has about 8TB worth of files on it, 6TB of that are image files - I am an amateur photographer.  Every 1-3 months I would copy the critical files to USB hard drives and I would take them to my office. Working remotely has worked well for our team, so I do not think we will be returning to the office.

 

I want to set up an offsite backup solution using an old HP desktop someone gave me. (AM4-5000 1.5Gz, 8GB ram)  I will probably just re-purpose the old USB drives I was using for the cold backups I had at the office. My parents have a cottage about 60km away and have  a high speed connection. I would set up the computer there.

 

I have enough experience in using Linux. I am considering setting up a Ubuntu Server with a VPN link between the offsite backup and my NAS.  With a simple Rsync copy job that would run periodically. Probably a pull configuration?

 

I suppose my question is, is there a better (ideally free) solution out there to achieve this?  Some sort of Linux appliance or open source project, perhaps with a nice web interface that would allot me monitor the backups from time to time, health of the drives, etc... 

 

And before anyone says anything, yes i can google it myself...  But I would just really appreciate some up to date suggestions to get me started.

 

Thanks.

[manikyath]

if you can let the remote system VPN in so you can access it directly, rsync is probably the most simple way of doing things.

[frokes]

As a non linux wizard I have really been enjoying unRaid. I personally use it as a NAS with the added bonus of being accessable over VPN when I'm on the go or on vacation and so far I've not had any problems. I'm sure it would work fine for off-site backups, unless you want to run something more fancy than parity disks. The main benefit IMO is that the web interface is actually quite nice and you can get tons of functionality with community apps and plugins.

[Windows7ge]

You could use a Client-to-Site VPN if you want but for speed and the amount of data I'd probably just opt for RSYNC over SSH. Setup the server with Public/Private Key Authentication. Enable the SSH service. Disable remote in as root. Disable password authentication. Then configure Password-less Public/Private Key Authentication and hand over the key using ssh-copy-id.

 

From here you can use cronjob to pass a RSYNC over SSH command and just point it to either the IP or Dynamic DNS of the remote site and you're done. It'll backup whatever data you point RSYNC to.

[Vulture78]

Thank you all for the replies.  I have been curious about Unraid... i may look into that for fun but it sounds like a good old rsync solution may be best.  

 

Thanks!