Computer > Computer > external hard drive

[Francois_Byrne]

Is there a way to have my office computer backup to my external hard drive located at my house which is connected to my computer there.

All this via internet. Sorry, I am new to all this.

[Pectojin]

It depends on your home machine and home network. You would need your home machine to host an FTP server or similar and your network would need to expose a network port for the office machine to connect over.

Many home networks have dynamic IP’s, that change every once in a while, so if this is the case for you that will also be tricky.

There isn’t currently a way to do something similar to Crashplan friend-to-friend backup. Both because they rely on a 3rd party server, but also because Duplicati doesn’t currently support receiving data from other Duplicati instances.

But assuming you host a FTP server on your home machine, open the network port in your home firewall, and deal with possible dynamic IP’s, then you can have a setup where you backup computer > computer > external hard drive.

I was able to get a static IP for free by calling my ISP, but there are also online services for getting DNS names you can then change the IP on when you discover that it has changed.

[Francois_Byrne]

No free static IP available unfortunately.

So no way of doing a Crashplan style system with any other software?

[Pectojin]

I couldn’t remember where I saw the post earlier, but I found it. There are a couple of people discussing Crashplan style backup here:

Any suggestions on Crashplan home-to-home setup?

As a CrashPlan Home orphan I’m looking for a way to replicate my current “swapping” backup with my dad (I back my stuff up to me and him, he backs his stuff up to himself and me). I run a few servers at my end so it’s no problem setting up SFTP, NextCloud, etc. and punching holes in firewalls but it’s a different story for my dad who is running Windows 10 and has little control over the pipe coming into his home. Are there any tools people might suggest using (or avoiding) to simplify things l…

You might be able to find something there like Hamachi or using a VPN into your office network, but generally it gets pretty complicated.

They also mention noip.com as an example of how you can deal with dynamic IP’s and still have a pretty reliable public address.

[JonMikelV]

Depending on the size of your backup you could do a local backup at work (say to a flash drive or just another part of your harddrive) then let something like rsync or Syncthing mirror that to your home drive.

I’m not sure about rsync but I believe Syncthing doesn’t need a fixed IP to find it’s destination.

[Pectojin]

@JonMikelV

I’m not sure about rsync but I believe Syncthing doesn’t need a fixed IP to find it’s destination.

I don’t remember the specifics of their implementation, but I think you might be right about Synthing. In that case you’d have two replicas of your backup and use twice the space, but it would probably resolve the issues with getting the data to the home machine.

[Francois_Byrne]

Hmmm, let me check out Syncthing. Thanks for all your help!