this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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[–] Vlyn 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But the NAS is in your house.. which basically means if it gets flooded/burns down all your data is gone too.

I already have my data on my PC, a second backup inside the same house isn't worth that much. But instead of relying on a cloud service I just rent a virtual server (for various things) and use Seafile to keep my data in sync.

PC breaks? House burns down? My data is on my own server in a datacenter. My server gets cancelled? My data is on my PCs.

So even with your NAS you are 100% reliant on a cloud backup still, so why did you get the NAS when you already have a copy of your data on your devices?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't really understand your comment.

PC breaks? House burns down? My data is encrypted in a datacenter. My account gets cancelled? My data is on my NAS.

I don't store much data on my PCs or devices at all. Any data that is there I treat as transient. The NAS acts as permanent storage. So if the devices die, I can quite literally restore them to the state they were in within hours of their death from the NAS. If my house is hit by a tornado and my NAS dies, my data is safely encrypted in an external location. I've lost nothing. If my NAS, devices, and Wasabi's data center are all hit by tornadoes at the same time we have bigger problems to worry about. If that ridiculous scenario happened your server would not be immune either.

I'm not seeing the advantage of your rented server vs having backups in the cloud. Is it because the server will keep running? But if you've lost your devices in a fire you still can't access it whether it's running or not. When you replace your device you can then connect to your server, but I can simply download my data again. HyperBackup Explorer is available for every platform and can do a full restore back to a NAS, or individual file downloads for anything else.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah i see ignore my other comment - didn't realize synology did remote backup as well as storage.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Sorry if I wasn't clear about that. My essential thinking with the NAS was: Cloud is nice, but how vulnerable are you if the Cloud provider turns evil?

With Apple and Google, you're basically screwed and there is nothing you can do.

With a NAS, you own the server. You don't rent it. You own it. You can hold the thing that stores all your private data in your own two hands.

So what if the data center I host my backups on becomes evil? Well, then they find a bunch of encrypted blobs they can't access while I move my backups to a different host. I'm not sure even the server hosting you're talking about is as secure as that. What if they become evil? How much access do they have to your data? All "evil" takes is a single policy change from a suit who has no idea about actual tech. It happens all the time.

Maybe that comes off as paranoid, but with all the data breaches and enshittification happening lately I feel much more secure having my data literally in my own two hands and a built-in defense against evil policy changes/government overreach for anything that must be hosted externally. Coupled with Tailscale for remote access I believe this as secure as you can get.

And again, Synology was my choice for ease of use, but you can build a capable NAS from an old Optiplex on ebay for 200 bucks + drives.