Best solution for back ups from Mac to Synology NAS to Cloud, and Searchable and Partial and or Full Restores from Cloud?

Over the years have used many types of backups including Time Machine, Arq and S3, Google Cloud, as well as Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud. I’m working on a more robust situation to cover the rare potential disaster as well as more common use cases.

Got a Synology network device that will hold 4 drives. One drive will be a smaller SSD for backing up from new MBP via Time Machine via ethernet. Yes, Time Machine can be unreliable, but plan on only using it for backing up my latest 1 or 2 backups. This way incase something happens to my computer which is a more common scenario, I can reformat and restore from Time Machine and be up and running incredibly quickly just where I left off. If Time Machine gets corrupted or that drive days I have my actual computer so can simply redo the backup and get another external drive or such.

But need a solution for old backups. Such as maybe I had a file but deleted it later on but some day need it again. Time Machine would support that, but don’t trust it to keep endless backups as eventually will probably get corrupted, and its not as efficient as backup storage. Backing up via Arq to say Google Cloud Nearline or more likely Cold storage would make a lot of sense since can back up endlessly, and backups all Mac’s meta data, so could either backup a whole instance if house burnt down with computer and nas, but far more likely situation is needing to access and old file and with the GUI I could access and download that one file. The problem here is along with backing up to NAS I’d need to backup from Mac to cloud which wouldn’t be ideal, since I don’t want it backing up to cloud when using the computer and since laptop wouldn’t be able to easily backup consistently when not using the computer.

Could backup from Mac through Arq to Nas using minion, or such, and then use NAS Cloud Sync supposedly up to the cloud. But then if I need to do a full restore sounds like it would be rather challenging since can’t restore from the cloud to the computer and skip nas. And wouldn’t be able to easily search for and restore one file from the cloud in that scenario easily, would probably have to restore the whole thing or something which would be terrible.

Sounds like duplicati while not as pretty, may work better. Either using it to backup to NAS and then NAS uses something else to backup to Cloud or use something else to backup to NAS and Duplicati from nas to cloud. But not sure how the restore process works in either case in the scenario where I want to search the old backups for a certain file, and restore just that or in the event I need to do a full restore of the latest backup.

I see many other people asking similar questions on reddit and on duplicati forums, but did not find one solution being perfect for this situation and wasn’t sure if the information was up to date.

Does anyone have an ideal solution, to note would only ever be backing up Macs. 1 usually potentially 2.

Welcome to the forum @ChrisC

Not me (to get that out of the way first).

Best solution for back ups from Mac to Synology NAS to Cloud, and Searchable and Partial and or Full Restores from Cloud? looks like the same question asked to a wider audience, and getting some input.

Duplicati’s pro and con of having a local database means maybe it’s easier to search (but I can’t say for sure that Arq can’t, since I don’t run it, or Time Machine, or NAS, or minion). Which minion is that BTW?

The archive point at Reddit reminds me of something that I say occasionally. Duplicati is not an archiver intended to archive-and-delete. Its search ability is rather crude, and it’s beta, so don’t delete originals… Your response sounds like you have another archive plan though. I just wanted to get a Duplicati point in.

To its credit, it uses the same backup format on all destinations (probably not alone there), which means restoring massive amounts of data over a slow Internet connection has a way out, if shipping is possible.

Sync or some other sort of off-site copy on backup is also possible, but ensuring the timing is right might be tricky. Sync schemes propagate flaws in backups. Independent backups or backup program is safest.

Your wish for a low-impact solution reminds me of tunings people sometimes do to Duplicati to keep the computer running well for its primary work (or to keep fan noise down). Other people prefer backups fast.

One program whose purpose is low impact backups of everything in sight for novice users is Backblaze. Duplicati users (and probably you) may want more control, so use Backblaze B2, but client also exists…

Restore By Mail describes that, and possibly there are raw-cloud-storage services that offer this as well. Internet backups are great, but full restores on disaster can be slow. Duplicati also has a DB to rebuild…

I’m also not clear on when you’d like the backup, and to where. I don’t know why cloud is terribly different.

Restoring files from a backup describes how to pick a point in time for a set of files to restore, or search.

An ideal solution to one person might be way too much work for another. I think tradeoffs are inevitable…

Thanks for getting back. I tried asking on Reddit, but so far no one seems to be answering/addressing the question and more just responding generically with their non-nas solutions. But hopefully someone eventually does, or hopefully by then will figure out the best solution for me, as each certainly have a lot of pros and cons.

I misspelled, I meant Minio https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/synology-backup-guide/.

Thanks for sharing all your thoughts will review more closely!