Hi all. Perhaps I’m expecting a bit much for a prosumer NAS, but is there any way on the EX2 Ultra to remote back up iSCSI volumes?
My PCs are BitLocker encrypted and I’m using Windows File History to back up to an iSCSI target on the NAS. It has to be iSCSI as:
- I don’t want to encrypt the entire volume on the EX2 due to the massive performance hit
- The EX2 doesn’t support encryption of individual shares
- BitLocker can’t encrypt network shares, but it can encrypt mounted iSCSI targets
- It would be stupid to encrypt my PCs and then keep unencrypted backups
I also have a second EX2 Ultra off-site for keeping remote backups. I’ve set up a backup task for my shares, but I can’t see any way to set up a remote backup for iSCSI volumes. This seems like a big weakness in the remote backup system, I would have at least expected some means of backing up the entire RAID volume to another drive of at least the same size.
If it really can’t be done, what other options do I have that would allow me to keep encrypted Windows File History backups on my local EX2 and replicate them to an off-site EX2? I’ve looked at GoodSync and it can do most of what File History does plus it supports encryption with network shares, but it’s not as tightly integrated with the OS as File History, and it’s expensive as it’s licensed per machine.
Well, seeing as nobody has replied, I went ahead and purchased GoodSync. As I said before, the licensing model is a bit of a pain as the free version is limited to 100 files. For it to be any real use, I had to purchase desktop licenses for both of my PCs and a Linux license for the NAS itself. I don’t know if the latter was necessary as I could have just mounted my shares in Windows directly rather than via the GoodSync server on the EX2, but using the proper app seemed less hassle.
I haven’t replaced my iSCSI file history targets just yet as I’m still assessing the reliability of GoodSync, but it has at least allowed me to set up an encrypted share that I can then synchronise between my two client PCs. The data is encrypted on the NAS side by GoodSync, so it essentially appears as garbage to anyone not running the client with the correct encryption key. The data remains unencrypted on the client (PC) side after synchronisation, except that I’m using BitLocker on my PCs, so the data is actually encrypted both sides but the process is completely transparent within Windows.
My other shares and the array in general remain unencrypted, which is what I want for performance reasons. It’s a real shame the EX2 doesn’t support this natively without encrypting the entire volume, as I probably would have spent more money on a Synology NAS if I’d known.
The next step will be to use GoodSync to back up (rather than synchronise) my entire user folder and enable file versioning. I’m hoping that if I specifically exclude my encrypted and synchronised folder from the backup job, that will save a bit of space and avoid data duplication.
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