I currently use Borg for all my backups. To have a remote backup I placed my old Synology NAS at a family member and connected it to tailscale (via a tailscale docker container). That way I could also can do Borg backups to that remote NAS.
Though I have problems with the stability of the tailscale connection from the NAS. And honestly, I’m a bit tired to fix these problems.
I would like to have a self hosted backup solution, that can reach the synology NAS. I would like to avoid port forwarding at my family members network (for obvious reasons). I have a VPS in the internet that I can use for a common self hosted contact point (like I setup headscale there instead of using official Tailscale servers).
What would be your way for handling these remote backups?
u_tamtam@programming.dev 10 hours ago
Tailscale being merely a wrapper around Wireguard, which is pretty close to optimally efficient, I don’t think there’s much of an improvement to be expected by rolling your own or hopping over your VPS. You should probably start with investigating what’s causing the tailscale connection instability (is it your ISP? Is it the network on the side of the NAS?). If you are not bound to Borg, perhaps you can give a shot at Kopia, I found it to be much more performant for my use-cases, and it has a http “repository server” which you might be able to use with less protocols overhead than through your current setup.
lucullus@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
So Tailscale connection instability is not common? I don’t like debugging this, since the NAS is remote and I don’t have much time going to the family member again and again for this. It definitely is something on the remote site, since the tailscale connections at my home are stable.
I will definitely have a look at Kopia. I was in search of a good open source backup solution, since borg also has its flaws. I will check it out, when I setup the remote NAS again (as I also want to put bigger disks in it)
northertech@fedia.io 8 hours ago
Yes it is uncommon, as people have mentioned it is a Wireguard wrapper. Try just using Wireguard and troubleshoot from there. I would want to know what that 'simple' solution is failing. Your workaround could have similar issues.
paperd@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
I am also using tailscale via headscale, and my connection has good. Only when the internet where my home server is down is the connection not available, and there isn’t much I can do about that.
patruelis@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Never had an issue with Tailscale and have been using it for years.
u_tamtam@programming.dev 7 hours ago
You don’t have to be on the NAS’ physical network to run some tests, if you can SSH into it, that’s enough to run some speed tests and latency tests to reference servers (e.g. Google, netflix, …), while doing the same from your PC simultaneously. Whenever you encounter “instabilities” you should be able to see which side of the connection is struggling more than usual. You should also be able to monitor the NAS itself for excessive IO or CPU using something like htop (even though that would be rather extraordinary if all that’s going on with it at that time is a Borg backup).
On the topic of Kopia, you can go the easy route of setting up a SFTP remote pointing to your NAS. All you need is SSH access to the NAS (so your current tailscale/borg set-up qualifies as is) and a folder where the SSH user can write. You can then compare backup times vs. Borg (in my use case, going from 18-25min with Borg down to 3-5min with Kopia). If you then want to try the HTTP repository server, there is a container for that, but the set-up is a bit annoying (the password to decrypt the repo needs to be stored on the NAS, you need to generate a SSL certificate pair and have the client whitelist the sha256sum of it, etc). Personally I haven’t found a substantial advantage to having the http repository server but YMMV.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 8 hours ago
I mean it’s a commercial product - if stability issues were a common thing, that would be well known and published.
It’s a mesh VPN so it generally has the same stability challenges as any other: Hamachi, Nord, Meshnet, Wireguard (which is the underlying protocol that Tailscale uses).
If the Tailscale client is running on the NAS itself, I’d consider that the first thing to troubleshoot.
NAS’s generally don’t have much extra processing power, and in my experience apps designed to run on them aren’t the most robust.
I have an ancient NAS on my network that could probably run the TS client, Injyst don’t bother. TD runs on all desktops and servers (for general access), but connectivity to non-TS devices goes through the server running as a TS router. That can be run on any device running TS - it’s just a feature to enable and configure.