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The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/TheOnceAndFutureDoug on 2025-02-22 21:31:25+00:00.
I’ve been on the hunt for a good backup solution for local backups of my systems and I’m struggling to find something that fits my needs.
What I’m looking for:
- Has to support Mac and PC clients.
- I want a GUI to manage scheduling and recovery.
- Backup triggers that do not require the device to online at a specific time.
- The option for full system and specific folder backups.
- Support for a Synology NAS as the backup target.
- I have a metered connection so I don’t want to do online backups.
- I’m OK with two separate apps running in concert to meet my needs (one thing that does full system snapshots, another that backups specific directories).
I have two main devices I’m going to want to backup and the needs are different. I have a Mac laptop that I’d be fine with only backing up at a specific time. A single rolling snapshot would be fine for this device. I also have a gaming PC that I only need specific directories backed up but I can’t just schedule it to run every night at 2AM because if I’m not using it I turn the system off.
I’ve tried a couple different things with mixed results.
- Veeam. This was my most recent attempt and I found the client to be unreliable. It also has to be backed up on a schedule (or manually triggered) if you’re just using the local clients. The full Backup and Replication service is Windows only and I don’t have a Windows box I can dedicate to running this. So Veeam is out.
- Time Machine. For a while I was using Time Machine at least for the Mac and while it works reasonably well most of the time it has one frustrating issue: A couple times a year it will decided the old backup volume on my Synology is no longer acceptable and I’ll need to delete it and reinitialize a backup. I can’t use an unreliable backup tool.
- Synology Active Backup. It works… Fine. While it can’t backup every hour or couple of hours it can backup when you first start it up and so forth so at least I don’t need to make sure my PC is up and running for it to work. However, I really want more scheduling options and it has other annoyances. I had to go in and allow kernel extensions on my Mac which was annoying and after updates (to my Synology) the backups will start failing and I need to re-approve the cert.
- Synology Drive. I use this as a Dropbox replacement and it works OK. I’m still looking at alternatives (Nextcould ran like crap when I threw it into Docker). I don’t want to do everything in its directory but I might if it comes to that.
In an ideal world I’d have one app that can do what I need for all my systems but I’m willing to divide and conquer if that’s what it takes. I’m also OK buying something if it’ll do what I need, but so far I haven’t found anything that feels worth the price tag.