Raspberry Pi Model A with Raspian on SD card.

There are several stages to this goal, and I'll get around to documenting the entire process, but the first thing I did was to investigate how to setup the disk encryption. I also wanted to improve the security by having the external USB HDD encrypted, which is something Synology still don't support, even though you'd think it would be a basic feature. Having recently switched my home internet connection to super fast fibre with unlimited bandwidth, I wanted a way to totally automate this off-site backup procedure. It wasn't much of a chore, and was certainly better than the old (and not terrible reliable) LTO-2 tape backup system we used for many years!

This would give us an off-site backup of all our company data, in case some catastrophe hit our server cabinet. Then on Monday, I'd take the external drive home and keep it on my bookshelf.

Every couple of weeks, I would bring a 2TB USB Hard Drive into the office on a Friday, plug it into the backup NAS, log into the dashboard and trigger a local backup. This primary NAS backs up daily to a secondary DS211j which does nothing other than act as a backup target for the primary. At the FinBlade office, we use a DS412+ Synology NAS for all our general purpose file storage.

Encrypt external drive