[REQUEST] Recommending a backup solution.

[Metanis]

Client is a radiology doctor. Works from home reviewing diagnostic images. (His hospital provides the equipment for this and it doesn't mix with his personal devices!)

However, he also teaches using thousands of hi-res images which have been de-coupled from personally identifiable patient information so he doesn't violate HIPAA. Finally, his wife does graphics work on her Mac and she has multiple GB of saved data.

Money is not a problem as he is an LLC and will be able to write off the investment. For example his laptop is a the top Dell model with a 4TB NVMe drive and 64GB of RAM. He has 3 separate 1Gb ISP feeds to the house right now, 1 for his hospital work and 2 for him personally.

Over the years they have used multiple external hard drives for backups. They also use OneDrive with nearly 1TB in use.

He wants to consolidate all the backup devices to a single on-premises device AND also then sync it to cloud storage. (One feed has 550Mb uplink!) The device will need to be both Windows and Mac friendly.

I'm thinking some sort of NAS for the local device. The consolidation task is more sticky, but he is a great fan of LapLink and uses it extensively so I may just let him deal with it manually. He is very good with maintaining folder naming conventions so can sync things up rather easily.

Yesterday we tried to catalog the external drives and he had nearly a dozen ranging from an old USB2 300GB up to a more modern USB3.2 with 5TB.

A big concern for him now is to ensure that none of those drives had data that didn't get moved forward to a newer device. Hence the consolidation part of this. I suspect the data will total to about 6TB when it is de-duplicated. With growth of perhaps 500GB a year.

This is an interesting opportunity and outside my realm of normal practice. Asking for ideas here, thanks!

 

[mmerry]

Synology NAS and MSP 360 for managed backup is my suggestion.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Datto BDR, though the price won't be terribly cheap. A local 6TB Siris appliance to start.

 

[Markverhyden]

Last I worked on it Synology supports Time Machine which you want to use if the Mac is recent. What ever back option you want for the MS machine to Synology. You can then backup Synology to iDrive for example.

 

[HCHTech]

I have a similar client - his main system is behind a hardware firewall on its own network, he has 4 big monitors in portrait mode for XRays and a single curved 32" monitor for regular computer work. I can't remember exactly, but I think he has a Quadro graphics card. We have a 4-bay Synology onsite and it backs up to both a big external and an encrypted B2 bucket. It's kind of fun working with the "money is no object" folks, for sure.

This guy does dictated reviews, he has a professional medical version of Dragon for that. I was working on his wife's computer one day and he must have reviewed 30 or 40 XRays and dictated notes over the course of an hour. All I could think of was that each one of those was billed to the insurance company at a few hundred dollars probably. It made me want to raise my hourly rate right there - haha.

 

[timeshifter]

Synology DS1522+ which is a 5 bay NAS. Use the Synology RAID calculator, probably use SHR1. Get a large 20TB (give or take) external drive for local Hyperbackup and then Synology C2 storage for off-site. Or another similar NAS at another location and use Tailscale.

 

[Metanis]

Thanks for all the replies. I'm researching Synology right now.

The device was supposed to be the backup destination, but I've just corresponded with the client to ask if he anticipates wanting to use the device for streaming media and/or surveillance cameras. In which case I'm sure to want the C2 cloud backup.

After doing some price shopping I'm wondering if he will be interested in using 2 units and setting up his own personal cloud! This stuff is really reasonable.

 

[Markverhyden]

I'm wondering if he will be interested in using 2 units and setting up his own personal cloud! This stuff is really reasonable.

That might actually be a better direction. Having a hard line, as we say in the O&G business, between personal and business would be a good thing in a HIPAA type environment.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Synology is amazing, but there is nothing HIPAA or compliant in anyway... if there is a compliance framework involved, get the Datto.