Question Backing up to a remote server - initial advice

[elsmandino]

Hi there.

I am currently running an Openmediavault and am thinking about doing remote backups to another Openmediavault server at a friend's house.

How is the best way to go about doing this?

What is involved in securely accessing a server that is outside your home network?

I have read that you can either use a push or a pull method of backing up. Is one preferable to the other?

 

[bill001g]

Way to hard to say in detail. It depends on what features the box has that can do this. I assume if you would have 2 on lan they can somehow copy data between them ?

So the method that likely will have the highest chance of working is to make a vpn between your house and other house. This makes the 2 lans "mostly" appear as a single network. This also tends to be the most secure because you are worrying about the end device having security exposures or bugs.

Other methods depends on how you get access via the internet to a device like this. This tends to be very proprietary so there is no way to say for sure. Some the data flows through the companies servers which you then get the risk of data theft or other security issues.

The key issue that will kill this project is you need a public IP on at least one end of the connection. This is true no matter if you use vpn or some other solution. It is better to have public IP on both ends.

The simplest vpn solution is to have the vpn run on the routers. Some disk systems have vpn ability again it varies greatly between these devices.

 

[punkncat]

Something else to keep in mind in regard to this. I don't know what media you have on here, but if you don't own it, own the rights to it, your ISP might throttle or outright block the movement of protected content across their network(s) and you may get a nastygram or worse from them and other powers that be over copyright infringement/rights.

 

[elsmandino]

Thanks guys - much appreciated.

I am in a bit over my head with this.

Just an initial question - is there any real difference between using Wireguard and Cloudflare?

Both seem to offer a similar thing but one seems to be referred to as a reverse proxy (Cloudflare) whereas Wireguard seems to be called a VPN.

 

[bill001g]

Cloudflare is a huge company. Mostly they do hosting for various web servers type things. They also provide dns service if you use 1.1.1.1. They might offer some kind of vpn. Not sure what reverse proxy mean. I would always be careful about services like this since your data would flow though their servers.

Wireguard is just one of the many vpn protocols. You also see openvpn often used. There are few others, the older IPSEC is still used by a lot of corporate users for point to point vpn. Openvpn is more supported but wireguard is getting more common. Wireguard is more efficient, I am not sure what the downside is to wireguard both are considered very secure.