offsite backup nas at grandparents house

[cTurtle98]

I live in santa cruz california and my grandparents live 12 hours (by car) away in st george utah so I figure thats a pretty good seperation to setup a NAS at their house as an offsite backup

I will need a NAS unit that does not need any physical maintenance more often than once every 1 to 2 years when I visit them for christmas

I also need one that allows me to connect it to a vpn and turn off all local access so my grandpas computers cant mess it up and I can access it when he inevitably switches ISP's because he is always looking for the best deal. (port forwarding will not be an option because of this so it needs to be VPN capable)

 

I need a minimum of 6tb (but 10tb would be nice) of storage and hopefully under $400

 

does anyone have any recommendations ?

[r4tch3t]

There are Nas units that connect to the internet, like synology, this would probably be the easiest.

Otherwise I'd suggest an off lease/second hand pc and chuck unraid on it.

[Pixel5]

synology is probably the way to go but you will still run into port forwarding stuff here.

 

In order to make sure he can mess this up you would need a managed switch where you can assign the NAS to a different network or maybe even block connections from anything but the router itself.

 

whenever he changes his ISP you will need to deal with some hassle for sure as this never goes smooth.

[dalekphalm]

15 hours ago, cTurtle98 said:

I live in santa cruz california and my grandparents live 12 hours (by car) away in st george utah so I figure thats a pretty good seperation to setup a NAS at their house as an offsite backup

I will need a NAS unit that does not need any physical maintenance more often than once every 1 to 2 years when I visit them for christmas

I also need one that allows me to connect it to a vpn and turn off all local access so my grandpas computers cant mess it up and I can access it when he inevitably switches ISP's because he is always looking for the best deal. (port forwarding will not be an option because of this so it needs to be VPN capable)

 

I need a minimum of 6tb (but 10tb would be nice) of storage and hopefully under $400

 

does anyone have any recommendations ?

I definitely recommend Synology NAS units. They are fairly simple to configure and maintain, but are still robust, and Synology offers excellent technical support (even for software issues - I had to contact them recently when our Archive NAS at work was refusing AD Account credentials).

 

For a Synology NAS, there's typically no physical maintenance needed. Though it's recommended to clean them (dust) every so often, Once a year would be sufficient, unless your grandparent's house is abnormally dusty.

 

In terms of making sure your grandparents can't accidentally screw up the settings, a simple username and password should be sufficient. Simply create a secure password for the Admin account, and only create other user accounts as needed.

 

Storage wise, you can just buy the correct sized drive bay + drive capacity that you need. Eg: If you want 6TB (I assume of useable space), buy a 2-bay NAS, and get 2x 6TB WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf drives - RAID1 them.

 

If you want 10TB, buy the 10TB variant instead of 6TB.

 

Alternatively, you could buy a 4-bay unit, and go with a RAID5 setup (say, 4x 3TB HDD's), but I don't really see that giving you much benefit for an off-site backup NAS.

 

As for VPN connection? I'm sorry to tell you that there is really no way around Port Forwarding, unless the Router supports hosting a VPN server.

 

If you host a VPN server on the NAS itself (Or via a server like OpenVPN on Linux, etc), then it will only have an Internal IP Address. Port forwarding would be required to give it an external WAN IP. As noted, if the router itself supports hosting a VPN, it will handle that sort of stuff in a mostly automated way. However, most consumer routers don't support hosting a VPN server (Many will support connecting to a VPN server but not hosting one). Third party firmware such as DD-WRT or whatever may be able to add this functionality, but there are many variables to confirm that.

6 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

synology is probably the way to go but you will still run into port forwarding stuff here.

 

In order to make sure he can mess this up you would need a managed switch where you can assign the NAS to a different network or maybe even block connections from anything but the router itself.

 

whenever he changes his ISP you will need to deal with some hassle for sure as this never goes smooth.

I don't think he needs to go so far as a managed switch. If he configures a secure password, his grandparents will never be able to even get past the login screen (if they happen to get that far).

[cTurtle98]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

I definitely recommend Synology NAS units. They are fairly simple to configure and maintain, but are still robust, and Synology offers excellent technical support (even for software issues - I had to contact them recently when our Archive NAS at work was refusing AD Account credentials).

 

For a Synology NAS, there's typically no physical maintenance needed. Though it's recommended to clean them (dust) every so often, Once a year would be sufficient, unless your grandparent's house is abnormally dusty.

 

In terms of making sure your grandparents can't accidentally screw up the settings, a simple username and password should be sufficient. Simply create a secure password for the Admin account, and only create other user accounts as needed.

 

Storage wise, you can just buy the correct sized drive bay + drive capacity that you need. Eg: If you want 6TB (I assume of useable space), buy a 2-bay NAS, and get 2x 6TB WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf drives - RAID1 them.

 

If you want 10TB, buy the 10TB variant instead of 6TB.

 

Alternatively, you could buy a 4-bay unit, and go with a RAID5 setup (say, 4x 3TB HDD's), but I don't really see that giving you much benefit for an off-site backup NAS.

 

As for VPN connection? I'm sorry to tell you that there is really no way around Port Forwarding, unless the Router supports hosting a VPN server.

 

If you host a VPN server on the NAS itself (Or via a server like OpenVPN on Linux, etc), then it will only have an Internal IP Address. Port forwarding would be required to give it an external WAN IP. As noted, if the router itself supports hosting a VPN, it will handle that sort of stuff in a mostly automated way. However, most consumer routers don't support hosting a VPN server (Many will support connecting to a VPN server but not hosting one). Third party firmware such as DD-WRT or whatever may be able to add this functionality, but there are many variables to confirm that.

I don't think he needs to go so far as a managed switch. If he configures a secure password, his grandparents will never be able to even get past the login screen (if they happen to get that far).

yeah it looks like synology is the way to go except...

 

I want a real vpn not a proxy vpn. so my computer and the nas think they have a second ethernet cable plugged into them and those cables are connected virtually over the internet through the vpn.

 

like I had a hamache mesh setup on my server and my laptop and it let me ssh into my server without port forwarding ssh

 

is that possible??

[dmaes]

I'm not sure, but if you host a vpn at your house and you connect your NAS to that vpn, you should be able to access your NAS. I will try it in a few hours and let you know if it works.

[dalekphalm]

20 hours ago, cTurtle98 said:

yeah it looks like synology is the way to go except...

 

I want a real vpn not a proxy vpn. so my computer and the nas think they have a second ethernet cable plugged into them and those cables are connected virtually over the internet through the vpn.

 

like I had a hamache mesh setup on my server and my laptop and it let me ssh into my server without port forwarding ssh

 

is that possible??

Presumably Hamachi "calls home" to a central server and funnels all your traffic through standard ports that won't be blocked.

 

This won't work with a traditional VPN normally. I mean, Port Forwarding the proper ports for a VPN server is the best thing to do. It's really not that complicated on most routers. And if your grandparents happen to get a new router, you'll just have to redo the port forwarding (If they get a new ISP but keep the router, port forwarding should still work if the new modem is setup correctly as a modem, and not as a modem/router combo box).

 

3 hours ago, 101dmrs said:

I'm not sure, but if you host a vpn at your house and you connect your NAS to that vpn, you should be able to access your NAS. I will try it in a few hours and let you know if it works.

That's exactly what he should do. Host a VPN Server (Either on the router, the Synology NAS itself, or on another computer acting as a "VPN Server") on-site, and that allows a secure direct connection to the NAS for off-site backups.

[cTurtle98]

8 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Presumably Hamachi "calls home" to a central server and funnels all your traffic through standard ports that won't be blocked.

 

This won't work with a traditional VPN normally. I mean, Port Forwarding the proper ports for a VPN server is the best thing to do. It's really not that complicated on most routers. And if your grandparents happen to get a new router, you'll just have to redo the port forwarding (If they get a new ISP but keep the router, port forwarding should still work if the new modem is setup correctly as a modem, and not as a modem/router combo box).

 

That's exactly what he should do. Host a VPN Server (Either on the router, the Synology NAS itself, or on another computer acting as a "VPN Server") on-site, and that allows a secure direct connection to the NAS for off-site backups.

I did some research and according to my research only the VPN server has to be port forwarded not the client and I already have a server computer at my house so I can just setup an openVPN server on it and have the Synology Nas connect to it as a client

 

I just need to know what VPN type the Nas is comparable with, (what server I need to setup at my house)