ISCSI makes networked storage appear as a raw, unformatted, locally mounted disk to your computer that you format and use however you’d like, with all of the benefits and limitations you’d expect from such an arrangement: you can’t share the volume with multiple users and the NAS can’t read the files or do anything dynamic, but it’s much faster, Spotlight works properly, and Backblaze will back it up like any other directly-connected disk.īut iSCSI is not designed for intermittent connections, like Wi-Fi - only use iSCSI over wired Ethernet. But you can trick it with iSCSI if your NAS supports it, and Synology does. 2 It’s a flat $5/month fee with unlimited storage, but while it supports external drives, it won’t back up network shares. I’ve used Backblaze to back up my Mac for years, and it’s still the option I recommend for that.

$96–120/month for RRS or S3 is simply not worth it when there are other options that aren’t priced per gigabyte. I’d only recommend Arq if you’re willing and able to pay for the more expensive S3 or RRS storage.īut my family’s backup set is about 4 TB (and growing).

Glacier isn’t made for this, and it never lets you forget that. I used Arq with Glacier for months, but I wouldn’t recommend it. On the special bulk Glacier service, 1 TB is only $10/month, but Glacier is extremely clunky - simple operations can take hours or days to complete.

The Reduced Redundancy option brings it down to $24/month, but that’s still significant. Arq to S3 or GlacierĪrq runs on a Mac, not on the Synology itself, and can back up any mounted file shares to Amazon S3 or Glacier.Īrq works well, but S3’s pricing can get prohibitive: priced per gigabyte, a 1 TB collection costs $30/month to host. I’ve greatly enjoyed my Synology NAS, the DS1813+, 1 for over a year, but I hadn’t found a good cloud-backup solution until now.

A programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.Ībout Cheap, huge cloud backups for a Synology NAS

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