I recently set up my Synology DS1515 NAS servers to back up my 12 terabytes of images and video to Amazon’s
I have two Synology DS1515 NAS servers, each with 20TB of spinning disks. I used to have one at home and one at a remote location, but I no longer have the remote location so now both are sitting in my home office. One NAS server acts as my primary image and data archive, while the second NAS server backups up the primary each night.
I have been wanting to implement some type of off-site storage ever since consolidating to a single location, but never found a solution that I felt was affordable and easy to operate.
I have been wanting to get some type of affordable off-site backup but everything I looked at was fairly expensive. Recently I settled on Amazon Glacier, which has worked GREAT. I downloaded an app for my Synology NAS that is made to back up to Amazon’s cheapest off-site storage, Glacier. I had to create an Amazon Web Services account and then set up a “target” in Glacier. The way Glacier is priced, it is really cheap to transmit and store data, but more costly to restore data. This was great for me since Glacier would be a worst-case off-site backup. I have a Cox 1Gbps high-speed internet circuit at home that costs $99 per month. It has a data cap on it, which we have never hit in 2+ years. But once I started the backup of about 12TB of images to Glacier, I got hit with Cox overages on the first month. Luckily that was only for the first upload and cost me around $90 in Cox overage charges to get my first backup into Glacier. Since that time I haven’t had any Cox overages.
Glacier Costs
My Amazon Glacier costs have averaged $19 per month after the first-month upload. That is right around the ballpark estimates I got – $1 per gigabyte per month. Pretty happy with those costs overall.
Synology Glacier Application
Best of all is the simplicity of setting everything up. I downloaded the Synology Glacier app directly from my NAS interface. It was quick and very easy. It took only about 15 minutes to get everything set up the first time. I already had an AWS account, so all I had to do in AWS is set up a Glacier target and then tell my Synology Glacier app about that target and provide some credentials. To be safe, I set up an AWS AIM account underneath my primary AWS account that only had access to my Glacier backups and used that on the Synology Glacier app.
