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Hello!

I am new here, hope you don’t mind my ignorance!!I am looking for some detailed steps/instructions to implement and achieve my data backup goals for a personal/home based setting.

  1. I Have quite a few kinds of devices in my home. couple of windows laptops, couple of iPads, couple of iPhones, an android phone, may be a macbook pro in the future.

  2. I don’t find it practical to connect separate USB external hard disks to each of these devices to back them up. So, what i am thinking to achieve instead is - if all of these devices can connect to a NAS, use one big drive say 6/8 TB and create individual folders to create separate backups of each of the devices, that is the ideal solution i am looking for.

  3. I haven’t decided yet on what model of NAS do i need. Any recommendations welcome!

  4. I am planning to use this NAS device just for backing up my multiple devices in one place. I am not looking for active file sharing among the different devices.

  5. Also create a backup of the 6/8 TB NAS drive to an external USB disk.

  6. Looking for using a free/open source backup software to achieve my goals above. I tend to lean on to veeam software.

  7. Want to know how i can isolate the NAS and prevent ransomware attacks

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iPads, tablets and phones don’t backup like PCs or macOS does, it’s individual folders that usually sync.

For mobile devices, including tablets and iPads you could look to use OneDrive to sync your files - as an option.

A NAS will often come with backup software that supports Windows macOS and Linux clients and most support time-machine for macOS too.

Backups usually create their own folder or files based on the machine name, so you shouldn’t need to segregate them, unless you want to.

QNAP and Synology are the two often recommended NAS brands for home use, personally I own a QNAP.

NAS units have a dedicated backup button for copying specific folder (in you case your backup folder) to an external drive, for this purpose. So you should be ok here.

When you decide on a NAS, get 2 drives, and mirror them, so your NAS has some protection too.

  1. See my point above about NASes often coming with their own backup products.

  2. Don’t put it on the internet and don’t run application you don’t need. Keep it updated and use MFA for logins.

If you want an application ‘like’ OneDrive or Google drive but prefer to host your own, Nextcloud/Owncloud will do this and have apps for IOS and Android, as above this is a sync of set folders, not a backup of the whole thing.

All of the above are free and you can usually install them as a VM or docker container on the NAS directly - assume you get one that supports VM/Docker.

2 Spice ups
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For starters, I would suggest a Synology NAS (I would use 2x 4TB SSDs in a 620slim or 409slim if you can find it).

Veeam Agent for Windows only work for PCs and lappy.

  • Create the Veeam recovery DVD
  • Backup either “entire computer” or personal files

Use the time machine for MACs

But I do not know if you can backup IPADs

Then get a 2nd NAS to either run in HA mode or use the Synlogy hyper-backup to backup 1 NAS to the other (not recommended as to recover, you still need a 2nd NAS).