Backing up your freenas to azure - ideal if you have an MSDN subscription

[AlVal]

I needed somewhere offsite for geographical redundancy for my home nas. As I had/have available recurring monthly azure credits, I tested out how I could backup specific folders on my nas to azure storage. Visual Studio Ultimate licence gives me US$150/month azure credits, which should net me 3tb of backup space , or 6tb if I can figure out how to use blob storage

to run the operating system: basic tier A0 instance of azure (windows server 2012 r2 with a 120gb c: drive and 768MB ram) £8 (US$13) per month

for file storage: lrs azure files storage (which allows you to add it easily as an extra drive to your windows vm): UK£0.0245 (US$0.04) per GB, that's £24.50 (US$40) per terabyte per month. and this is their current "half price while in preview mode" pricing. If I can find a way to switch to using azure "blob" storage instead of "files" storage (I'm sure there's a way, it's just a bit technically "involved".. , the cost here could be reduced quite a lot - e.g. £14.70 (US$24) per terabyte per month

guide to mounting the lrs azure files storage as a drive inside the vm: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/storage-dotnet-how-to-use-files/

for transferring by rsync: Acrosync https://acrosync.com/home.html (I chose this because it has a UI, and because it's windows native rather than cygwin based) US$50

 

[blade25233]

Chiming in because this strategy is potentially awesome for me as well.

How are things going so far, you get it working?

 

[AlVal]

Yes, all works really well. Even the top commercial products which allow you to mount blob storage directly as a drive turned out to be unreliable and error prone, so I'm sticking to the azure files storage although it's more expensive - no errors, works solidly and is meant for this purpose. One other thing, drives have a limit of 1tb each, and there's a limit to how many drives you can attach to the cheap azure vm instances, for instance the cheapest a0 instance only allows you to attach 1 drive, I had to upgrade the instance to a more expensive one which allows 4x 1tb drives to be attached, which you can then stripe together in disk manager to present it as 1x 4tb drive in windows.

Acrosync can provide you with incremental snapshot functionality too.

So yes, I can finally rest easy that I have a proper offsite backup strategy. It's working well, and my msdn ultimate allowance of us$150 /month azure services is enough to cover me for 4tb. Plus, the box can be used for other things. Now just need to find something less complex and more gui based than bacula to get the laptops etc around the house backing up to my freenas!

 

[adamjs83]

Did you ever figure out how to get this working with BLOB storage?