I have a synology NAS where I backup my photos to. What would be the most cost effective way to encrypt and back up this data without having to purchase another NAS and install it at a family member’s house. It would be about 5 TB and would not touch the data unless my NAS completely takes a crap.
I’m a big fan of Backblaze; $50 per year for unlimited backup for one device, and you can generate your own encryption key so they can’t access your data.
Is that the backblaze personal backup service? I see it for $70 per year or $130 for two years.
I don’t think Backblaze’s personal unlimited tier is going to easily support op’s Synology. I’m sure there’s a way to get it to work, but their B2 service integrates with Synology and is the appropriate route to take. Op’s looking for redundancy. I wouldn’t want to rely on an unsupported work around to guarantee my data when they offer a service that’s targeted towards what they want to accomplish.
Backblaze B2 is probably going to be the cheapest and seamless options since they say it integrates with Synology NAS. It’s $5/TB/month.
Microsoft Azure Archive storage looks like it might be cheaper per month, but that’s just going based on storage costs alone. This guide has a pretty decent explanation of examples of the cost to upload and store it.
Backblaze B2 has the synology integration and op wouldn’t have to think about the costs of being able to access or retrieve the data from something like Azure cold or archive storage tiers, since B2 is sold as a hot storage option.
The backup service is good, inexpensive and easy to set up, so easy to recommend.
I now use their B2 service with duplicati (available as a docker container, but idk how well it works with Synology). It’s dirt cheap and equally reliable, but requires more setup by the user, and you must follow good practise and do a test restore of some files to make sure it works.
So it’s really a trade-off, depending on what you want to prioritise.
I’m somewhat tempted by B2 but $5/TB/mo feels a bit steep for a NAS.
For me that would be about $100/mo, and for OP that’s $25/mo. It would only take a few months before buying a drive for off site cold backup would be more cost effective.
Considering their personal plan is $7/mo for unlimited TBs, it really invites hobbiests to find workarounds after their first TB. Unless I’m missing something.
Hetzner.com Storage Box might be worth looking into. I have no personal experience with it yet but I’m considering it.
5TB is about 13€/month. You get 20 Snapshots for data safety. It supports a lot of protocols like cifs and rclone which makes it possible to mount as a network drive and encrypt remote backups with rclone crypt.
My go-to backup strategy is USB hard drives. They’re cheap, they’re fast, and nobody’s going to even try to decrypt them. Buy several, put them in a safety deposit box at your bank, rotate them weekly, and nothing short of a nuclear weapon will destroy every copy of your data at the same time.