Backup solution needed: Hard Drive to NAS via Internet?

Backup solution needed: Hard Drive to NAS via Internet?

My dad is a photographer who is understandably paranoid about losing his photos to a HD crash. He stores his data on an external HD and then periodically backs them up to DVD. To me this seems tedious and I'd like to find a (more) automatic, cheap solution. My idea is to use my NAS (a ReadyNAS NV) to allow him to back up his files from his house to my house. That would make things very secure by having the backups in an entirely different location. He is not particularly tech-savvy, so I need his end to be pretty simple and easy to use. We are both running Windows, and I can set up a machine to be always on (at my location, where the NAS is) and use a service like dyndns.com to have a subdomain that always points to my home IP.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 270

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Guest [Entry]

"Given that you're gonna be sending data over the net, you want to minimize on traffic, so you should probably synchronize the data in the two places so that you're only sending incremental changes rather than sending the entire dataset each time.

The most popular synchronizing services is rsync and luckily enough Readynas supports it. Many people use it as a backup solution, however I don't actually know much about using it on Windows. I found this how-to which makes it look like it can be done. Obviously it won't be able to help you configure the Readynas, but if you find you need help with that there should be plenty of help and resources over the at the Readynas forums.

I should add that like with most of other ways of solving this problem, your router is going to need to have a static IP address (or if it doesn't you can use a dynamic DNS service such as dyndns) and you'll need to forward the rsync port to your readynas."