Rsync to Offsite Backup

  • Goal: An offsite backup of my home NAS.


    The Plan: I have a NAS at home running OMV. I have a MacBook Pro that has an unreliable, water damaged keyboard but otherwise works okay. My plan is to tuck the MacBook Pro away in the closet at my office, plug in an external hard drive, and run Rsync to sync my home NAS to my external hard drive at work. In my head, I envisioned the MacBook at work connecting to the NAS at home to pull the files onto the external hard drive. I assume this would require an OpenVPN or Wireguard tunnel.


    My Ask: I have found tutorials for Rsync backups, but I can't find anything that combines Rsync with the OpenVPN offsite steps. Would someone be able to point me to a tutorial or help me reach my dream backup solution?


    Thank you to all the wonderful people on this forum who provide so much help out of the goodness of their hearts.

  • I don't think you'll need a VPN solution, since rsync connects to remote servers through an SSH tunnel. By simply forwarding your Macbook's SSH port to the public Internet (use a custom port other than 22), then creating a private/public key pair and disabling password-based logins, you should have a straightforward way of running remote backups while maintaining appropriate security.

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