We have a large Racktop/BrickStor HA NAS containing hundreds of terabytes of unstructured data. We currently use a Parsec Labs appliance to back it up to Wasabi, and we occasionally use its migration tools as well. Since Parsec was acquired by Pure, renewal and licensing have become increasingly difficult, and we've heard the migration functionality may eventually be deprecated.
We already use Veeam for virtual machine backups and have been happy with it, but its unstructured-data licensing is far too expensive for this environment. We also don't have the budget for a disaster-recovery site or a second 1.5 PB NAS.
I'm looking for a reasonably priced backup solution that can handle 10 GbE speeds, write to a Wasabi S3 bucket, and provide useful logging. It could run on Windows, Linux, or as an appliance. What solutions have worked well for backing up large amounts of unstructured data without excessive licensing costs?
2 Answers
Have you considered rclone with a scheduled job? It supports Wasabi and other S3-compatible storage natively, can handle high transfer rates when configured properly, and provides useful logging. There’s no licensing cost, so it may be worth testing before committing to another appliance.
Veeam can back up NAS data to an S3 bucket through a Scale-out Backup Repository, and it does work technically. The problem is the licensing model: unstructured data is counted in 500 GB instances. At this scale, that would require roughly 800 instances and would keep growing, making it far too expensive for this use case.
I’m looking into it now. The $0 licensing certainly gets my attention, especially after dealing with expensive infrastructure software.