Category: NAS

AzureStorageBackup — I got tired of waiting for someone else’s backup tool to be fixed

~ allen ~ Leave a comment

I run a QNAP NAS, and for a long time its HBS3 handled my backups to Azure. Or tried to. Every so often something strange would surface in the Azure job, and every fix meant days of back-and-forth with support before anything moved. Eventually the arithmetic flipped: with AI helping me write it, building my own tool became cheaper than waiting for theirs to work.

So I did — and I added the things HBS3 never gave me. The one I wanted most is encrypted file names: archives are written with 7-Zip AES-256 including the header, so the storage container holds opaque pack blobs, not a readable map of my directory tree.

What it does today:

  • Incremental backups — unchanged files are never reopened; a file whose timestamp moved but whose content didn’t is re-hashed, not re-uploaded.
  • Small files packed, large files split into volumes, with per-extension rules for what not to compress.
  • Versions, retention, and Hot/Cool/Archive tiers.
  • Pause, Suspend, Resume. Every confirmed upload is journalled to disk, so an interrupted run — including a container upgrade — picks up where it stopped instead of resending terabytes.
  • Network hiccups back off and retry rather than failing the run.
  • Scheduled jobs, integrity checks, repair from your local copy, and restore.
  • One multi-arch Docker image (amd64 + arm64), web UI on a single port. Built for a NAS: 7-Zip runs at lowest CPU priority by default.

It only targets Azure Blob Storage, because that is all I need. If your destination is S3, Backblaze or a box in your basement, the engine is the part worth having — fork it and swap the back end. MIT licensed.

Try it: https://github.com/SecretNest/AzureStorageBackup

Issues and pull requests welcome.

QNAP removed sleep function on new NAS products

~ allen ~ Leave a comment

I have several generations of NAS from QNAP. I have a, maybe not good, habit of putting them into sleep mode every night. Because there is no one access them overnight, it really help to reduce the noise and not bring much jobs, like entering password for unlocking, other than press the power button to resume.

Several months ago, I brought a new one, TS-873A, found there is no sleep function left. I contacted some other users, who use other new models as well. No one see such a function any more. To make sure it is, I fired a ticket to the help desk, the answer is the same — sleep function is no more supported.

The official documentation says nothing about this change. By searching the reason why sleep mode is missing, only one article saying that SED SSD Storage Pool does not support the S3 Sleep function. But actually, all kinds of SSD/HDD cannot have a good sleep in new models at all.

I don’t know the reason but leave this as a notice to the ones who want to buy a new NAS from QNAP.