Backing up your Synology to Backblaze B2
It’s simple to backup your memories with little effort and little cost
If you’re like me, and the title interested you, you have a local NAS in your home office to run your own private cloud. Dump all your data there, serve it up to all of your devices, and spend hours, days, or weeks getting it just right.
On the other hand, now you have all of your eggs in one basket. Everyone knows that they should back up their data, however it is likely the last thing to work on, and not the most fun. I personally ignored it for years, rotating an off-site backup every couple of months. However, I’ve recently seen the light, and for a few bucks a month I’ve grown to love backing up to the cloud, and Synology makes it really simple to do so.
Backup basics
There is a tried and true strategy for managing backups: the 3–2–1 rule. Maintain 3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of media, with one of them being offsite. Back in the day that would mean a production copy and two backup copies, with two different media (hard drive and tape), and one being off-site.
With the introduction of the cloud, things have gotten a bit simpler. I’ve modified the rule to allow for the NAS (production), an on-site backup to an older Synology, and a backup to the cloud. One of the main drawbacks to backing up to the cloud is the cost of getting the data back if you lose it all locally. In general, putting data into the cloud is free (or cheap), and getting it out is expensive. The local backup helps in the event my primary Synology blows up, and the cloud is there in the event a flood or a fire wipes out both.
Backing up to Backblaze B2
There are a lot of cloud providers out there, but after doing some research I ended up on Backblaze B2 (this isn’t sponsored in any way, just a happy, paying customer). With their introduction of S3 buckets, Backblaze made it very simple to backup folders on your Synology to their cloud. There are a lot of cloud providers out there that want your business, and many of them have S3 capabilities or out-of-the-box integrations with Synology.
If you like Backblaze for your cloud provider, the set up is fairly simple and straight forward:
- Create an account, set up a profile, billing, etc.
- Create a new bucket.
- The name has to be unique, not to just your account, but all of Backblaze. So go nuts on adding random characters.
- Mark it Private, because you don’t need everyone seeing your lolcat collection.
- I disabled default encryption as we’re going to let the Synology encrypt everything. You could consider this a belt-and-suspenders approach, but I didn’t see much value in it.
- I also disabled object lock. As the Synology is handling all the data via its packaging, it didn’t seem to make sense. Let me know if you see otherwise.
- Update the Lifecycle Settings by determining how long you want to keep old files around, keeping in mind there’s a cost to keeping files longer. The downside to only keeping the latest version is in the event of a ransomare attack on your network you’ll write over your good backup. I went with 32 days, as my data shouldn’t be changing that much and I hope I would detect an encrypted NAS in that amount of time.
- Create a new API key. Give it a name, allow it access to the bucket you just created, allow it to read and write, and allow it to list all the bucket names.
- Save this API key in your password manager. It only appears once. If you don’t have it in the future you’ll need to change it everywhere you use it.
Back on your Synology, install and launch Hyper Backup. Click the + to add a new Data backup task. For the Backup Destination select S3 Storage.
When you click Next you’ll want to select Custom Server URL. This URL is defined by the endpoint URL in your Backblaze bucket. Change the Signature Version to v4, leave the Request Style at Virtual Hosted-Style, paste in your Access Key (keyID) and your Secret Key (applicationKey). If everything works you’ll get results when you select the Bucket Name dropdown. Add in a directory where you want all your data to go (I left it as the default) and click Next.
At this point you can select which volumes you want to back up. Drill down into each volume to select sub-folders if the need arises. Click Next and select any applications that you would like to back up.
On the next page there are several options:
- Give the task a name.
- Choose if you would like to be notified.
- Enable Compress backup data if you want to reduce your cloud footprint at the price of some processing power (I enable this).
- Enable transfer encryption so that your connection between your Synology and Backblaze is secure.
- Select a backup schedule and integrity check that suits your needs.
- Enable client-side encryption. This is important, as it will encrypt the data stored on Backblaze so that in the event your data is compromised, it’s still secure. Enter a long, complex password. Let your password manager create and store it. Mine is 25+ characters, upper, lower, and numbers.
- Backup rotation: I left this unchecked as I am asking Backblaze to keep track of older versions. This might be useful to enable this, however it might also be cost-prohibitive based on your settings.
- Finally, click Done.
Once complete, you’ll need to run your initial backup, which might take a considerable amount of time based on how much you’re backing up and your connection speeds (be cognizant of your ISP data cap!). Personally, I enabled one volume at a time to allow for some prioritization, focusing on my most critical items first, and then things that I wouldn’t be upset with losing.
Feel better about your data
This takes care of your cloud backup. As discussed earlier, ensure that you have a local backup handy to save yourself some money in the event the worst happens.
My last month I was charged $5.34 for somewhere around a terabyte of storage, and it has been worth every penny. Consider how bad it would feel to lose everything on your NAS, and take 15 minutes to apply the 3–2–1 rule.
