I recently discovered that my offsite backup NAS, a Synology DS118 with a 12TB drive in it, had filled up. I considered several solutions to this problem, eventually deciding to replace the DS118 with a DS225+. Since Synology now requires Synology-branded drives, I had to either buy two new drives or I had to shift some drives around.
To save some money, I decided to shift drives around rather than buy two new drives for the DS225+, because the 12TB drive would work nicely in my local backup NAS, and I recently purchased two 6TB Synology HDDs to replace dead drives in my local NAS units. I decided to buy a single 16TB Synology drive in conjuntion with using one of my recently purchased 6TB drives; as a result, I have about 22TB in the DS225+.
I decided to configure these drives as two basic volumes, rather than as a single volume, because I don't care about redundancy for this unit, and because I do not want a single failed drive to destroy all of my remote backup data, which is what would happen in a JBOD setup.
After I installed the 16TB drive, I started priming the backup. For my remote backup solution, I use Synology's Hyper Backup because it works well, works fine over WireGuard, and is easy to use. A short while after starting to prime the new backup, I noticed that the operation was taking forever... I traced this down to a bad switch port on my desktop switch: The backup was running at only 100Mbps! Simply relocating the cable fixed the issue.
Once the backup is primed, I will take it back to my friend's house, and I will reconfigure Hyper Backup to point to the new location.
Access to the unit will be over WireGuard -- the DS225+ will connect to one of my DigitalOcean VMs, and
OSPF will allow me to easily route to it. For WireGuard on the Synology, I used
this guide to find the installation SPK, then
I followed the standard WireGuard setup. I generated the key by running something like this: wg genkey | tee private.key | wg pubkey > public.key.
Then I configured the WireGuard client on the DS225+ by creating /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf with these contents:
[Interface]
Address = 192.168.x.x/30
SaveConfig = false
Table = off
PrivateKey = GENERATED_PRIVATE_KEY
[Peer]
PublicKey = PEER_PUBLIC_KEY
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0, ::/0
Endpoint = hostname:port
PersistentKeepalive = 3
Once the peer was configured as well, a simple wg-quick up wg0 on the DS225+ was all I needed to establish
the connection.
In order to ensure that this connection is started when the NAS boots, I also ran wg-autostart enable wg0
on the DS225+.
WireGuard + FRR really is a great solution for remote systems like this offsite backup NAS.
I am a system engineer in the Raleigh, NC area. My main interests are Unix, VMware, and networking. More about me, and how I got started.