Is off-site backup automatically "buddy-backup" ?

[driveaholic]

Hello people, after the first announcement last year by Linus i promptly jumped on the opportunity to purchase a license. Now I want to build my storage to retire my synology and do storage properly. 

I want to put a small PC with a few HDDs to my parents house to back up my storage at home. My parents don't need access to that PC nor do I want them to have any access to that data. Is this what they

call the "buddy-backup" for which I need to buy a second license or is there a way to attach a second pc with a few HDDs to my main NAS with that one license? Quasi as a external drive just not attached via

USB but over the internet?

 

If that question has already been asked and answered please feel free to delete this or move it, but I was not able to find an answer by searching.

 

Thanks a lot!

[PsychoWards]

Hey,

1 license is for 1 single server.

Your use case would be 2 servers and thus 2 licenses. (because each server needs it own OS to be installed) 

However buddy backup is not yet available, you can however already today realise this using different ways, which do require a bit of setup. (but still a 2nd Hexos license) 

[driveaholic]

Thank you! for your quick reply and clearing this up. Could I perhabs use the old Synology 4Bay NAS as a backup machine for ofsite backup? I mean that thing still works. I have no idea if there is the possibility to link HexOS to any other NAS?

I will buy a second license anyways since I need it for my parents their own storage but it would be a shame to have the Synology sitting there unused

[PsychoWards]

Hey,

Yes you can use your old Synology NAS as the target for a backup, but you cannot install Hexos on it, it can only run the proprietary Synology OS on it. 

You still need a way to connect from your place to your parents house, this is in your case likely best done by setting up a VPN server (Wireguard or Tailscale) on your parents side. (either in the router or the NAS).

Then you just need to setup a rsync task which is running periodically, you find a lot of guides out there on how to do this, for the time being you need to configure this in Truenas and not they Hexos dashboard. 

It's best to do the initial filling via the local network and only afterwards move the NAS to your parents place for the delta backups.