Small office backup plan

[Low Roller]

I'm am in the process of getting together a backup plan for a small office. I help the place out when they have tech issues, and it recently became apparent to me that the "backup plan" in place now ranges from wholly insufficient to non-existent.

The office consists of 2 PC's and one Mac.

I'm a WHS guy for my stuff here at home it it works great for me. I've not heard great things about using Time Machine and whs 2011, so I picked up a Synology DS214 along with 2 x WD 4TB Red hdd's I plan on configuring in RAID 1. 4TB of storage leaves plenty of room for growth as the combined amount of data on the 3 hhds on the 3 computers is less than 500GB. Knowing how these machines are used, that amount of data will grow very slowly.

So, the Synology seems great, but from what I know about it, I wouldn't be able to preform a bare metal restore with it's backups(assuming I backed up the entire c: volumes on the PC's) like I can with WHS. I really like that option because it's so quick and easy to get a machine in the exact condition it was before, and I can select from daily time stamped backups should the PC get a virus or trojan etc. If there's a hard drive failure I can get a replacement up and going in no time, or if I want to upgrade the size of an SSD its all very easy to do. As of now, here is what I'm thinking:

Acronis TI on the PC's and Time Machine on the MAC -----> Synology ---------> Amazon Glacier.

The reviews of the latest versions of Acronis are kinda scary, so I'm all ears for other solutions.

Last thing. I have two choices on where to place the Synology. Right now, I'm leaning toward a locked room that houses all the major electronics in the building. It holds a pretty sophisticated intercom system, the buildings main network switch that feeds ever room on location ethernet, as well as a few other things. The advantages to this location is it's in a separate locked room away from the office that hardly ever sees traffic. Disadvantages is the climate control. While there is some, it get's pretty warm in there in the summer and cool in the winter. The other option is to just put the Synology in the office itself. The advantage here is rock steady climate control. 72F no matter the time of year. Disadvantage is it's in the same room as the three PC's it's backing up. If something like a burglary happens to the office, it's exposed. Doubt a theif would be interested in an electronics closet on the other side of the building, let alone know where it is.

Thanks in advance for your replies.

 

[stormy1]

You do know that a nas isn't backup right?
What happens if the building gets hit by a massive lightning strike or burns down?
Where is the data then?

 

[Low Roller]

You do know that a nas isn't backup right?
What happens if the building gets hit by a massive lightning strike or burns down?
Where is the data then?

Yes on the NAS. In your scenario, assuming total data loss throughout the building, the data would be on Amazon's Glacier cloud storage service. Glacier backs up the Synology in this case and hence, all the data.

Thanks for the response and I am open to suggestions.

 

[stormy1]

Yes on the NAS. In your scenario, assuming total data loss throughout the building, the data would be on Amazon's Glacier cloud storage service. Glacier backs up the Synology in this case and hence, all the data.

Thanks for the response and I am open to suggestions.

That will work if they have decent bandwidth.

 

[Comenius]

Have you thought about CrashPlan for the offsite backup portion of your plan? It operates in near real-time and allows you to go back in time to previous versions much more easily than using something like Amazon Glacier or S3.