Can I efficiently backup data remotely to a NAS at home?

[mxmaniac]

Just trying to get pointed in the right direction. Perhaps there is an even better way to do this that i'm not thinking of.

I plan on going on vacation later this year, and I'm sure I will take a lot of photos and HD video. I would upload the videos to my laptop each night to clear room on the cameras for the next days shooting, but I would like to have a way to also backup my data each night to a remote location, just in case something were to happen to the laptop. I want that peace of mind.

I was thinking about purchasing some sort of NAS, or else setting up a Raspberry Pi with a large hard drive to function as a NAS. Thinking maybe I can SSH into the RPi each night, and transfer all the videos. I'm guessing it may be anywhere from 1-30GB per day, hard to say. Is that a reasonable amount to stream home overnight on a typical DSL connection?

Since I have no hands on experience with either a NAS or homemade RPi NAS, I figured I would ask to make sure this will work well, or will I run into bottlenecks or other problems.

Thanks.

 

[seepy83]

It really depends on the upload speed (and the download speed at the other end, but chances are the upload speed from wherever you are vacationing will be the bottleneck).

I know that my UVerse connection at home is limited to a max of 2 Mbps (little b, megabits per second) upload. Under ideal circumstances, that would result in a little under 1 GB (big B, Gigabytes) upload per hour.

 

[hoorah]

Anything you do upload will be saved from disaster, so its better than nothing.

At 1mbit upload speed, you're looking at around 3.6GB over an 8 hour period overnight.

If this is your first time playing with a nas, I'd probably skip the RPi and go straight to an established NAS brand or do something with your desktop at home. Maybe you're a linux whiz but I would focus on getting the nas to work first before adding on the complexity of doing it with a Pi. FreeNAS would be a great way to get started if you wanted to roll-your-own on an old computer you already have.

A super duper quick and dirty way of doing what you want to do is using Skydrive or Dropbox. I don't know how much space you have with either service but skydrive gives you 7GB out of the box, many older users have 25. Dump all of your files into skydrive as you pull them off the camera and onto you laptop and they will immediately begin uploading in the background.

When the days take is done uploading, or your skydrive/dropbox is full, remote login to your desktop at home and move them out of your cloud storage and into something long term.

 

[seepy83]

Anything you do upload will be saved from disaster, so its better than nothing.

He might as well just get a USB Flash Drive or External Hard Drive and back up everything from the camera to the laptop, and then copy to the USB device. That really should be enough to prevent loss of data...especially if the ability to upload to a remote location is limited by a slow internet connection.

 

[stlcardinals]

He might as well just get a USB Flash Drive or External Hard Drive and back up everything from the camera to the laptop, and then copy to the USB device.

Bingo. Take it a step further and if you check baggage, put the hard drive in your checked bag while keeping your laptop in your carryon. If you are planning on taking 30GB a day, you are not going to find a fast internet connection to upload that much in a night.

 

[mxmaniac]

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I thought about bringing a usb hard drive, and still might, but really want the storage remote simply because I figure if something bad were to happen to the laptop such as a theft, then that same thing would most likely happen to the usb hard drive too.

The idea of uploading to a skydrive and then using RDP/VNC to a computer at home and downloading is a interesting possiblity. I'm wondering, though what would be the advantage of doing it this way, as opposed to just transferring the file directly over RDP/VNC or SFTP directly to the home PC?

 

[aceO07]

Don't forget to enjoy your vacation away from the camera. I average about 48GB of photos over 2 weeks on vacation. I mix up the image quality, else it would take a lot more space. Think about 17GB for 650 raw file. Also 1080p videos eat up space at a fast rate!

Take a 1TB external drive (small/portable) or 2 and backup on there. It may be hard to try to backup data online if you're thinking of 15-30GB/day unless you have great connection and can leave laptop on to upload all day. If you had time you could review photos and then backup your favorites.

I would recommend paying for a month of webhosting/vps, but it looks like you need a lot more backup space than 40GB or so..

Edit: I have not taken a laptop on vacation in recent years. I do take about 3-4 16GB memory cards for my camera.

 

[seepy83]

I'm wondering, though what would be the advantage of doing it this way, as opposed to just transferring the file directly over RDP/VNC or SFTP directly to the home PC?

The biggest advantage is that you don't need to set up any infrastructure. Just create an account for Dropbox or whatever else and you're ready to go.

If you're going to set up a FTP server at home, what if your power or internet at home goes down? What if the machine you're running the server on dies? Obviously there are ways to protect against those problems, but most people don't have a resilient infrastructure at home because there are significant costs associated with it.

 

[hoorah]

The biggest advantage is that you don't need to set up any infrastructure. Just create an account for Dropbox or whatever else and you're ready to go.

If you're going to set up a FTP server at home, what if your power or internet at home goes down? What if the machine you're running the server on dies? Obviously there are ways to protect against those problems, but most people don't have a resilient infrastructure at home because there are significant costs associated with it.

Right. Power goes out - did you set the BIOS to auto power on when the power is restored, even if you have a UPS? System restarts to do an update but you have a bootable flash drive plugged in and never comes back up. All sorts of little gotchas go into making a setup reliable and sometimes they take time to find - not something I'd want to do right before going away on vacation.

Skydrive and Dropbox will be many times more reliable than anything we can build at home and its ready immediately.

I have a home server and a NAS but when I'm away from home I always put stuff in my skydrive if I want it backed up immediately.