Synology Project Part 9: Configuring OneDrive Backups

Posted on October 28, 2018August 27, 2020 by Terry Sheridan

Cloud Storage is great! it allows you to have flexibility of where some (or all) of your data is and can be accessed from almost anywhere. The down side is that the only thing that is really protecting that data is a password. Side note whenever possible enable 2 factor authentication for everything. While 2 factor authentication isn’t perfect you drastically reduce your attack surface when compared to just a username and password.

Now that my random side note is out of the way. OneDrive backups! OneDrive especially for work or personal usage is just like any other data 9 out of 10 times will fall under the 3-2-1 Backup rule.

3 Copies of all important data
2 Copies in Backups
1 Copy offsite.

This poses a question of. How to backup something that is already off-site/in the cloud?

Generally this is answered in a Hybrid situation. In OneDrive’s case (up until recently) right of the bat you had 2 copies of the data. 1 on your computer and 1 in their Cloud. If something happens to 1 of those 2 locations you could use the other location to recover data. Recently by default OneDrive has stopped automatically downloading all the data to your computer because they improved their backup/versioning options. So how do you get that 3rd copy for backups?

Te simple answer is that you dump that cloud data into your NAS.

I’m going to use Synology’s Cloud Sync Application to download my OneDrive data from the Cloud to the Synology. This way if anything happens to the data I have a copy on my computer, a copy on my NAS and a copy in the cloud.

Lets get started.

First Go To Package Center and Download the Cloud Sync Application.

As you can see I’ve already got it installed and running. Go a head and open it when it is ready.

Under the admin account I’ve already got BackBlaze configured to backup the files that only stored on the NAS.

I have 3 main accounts for my Synology. The admin account and 2 user accounts for my wife and I. Just like in a business environment regular users don’t need to see the infrastructure backup configuration. I’m going to up these backups for the Backblaze Cloud Sync is hidden from the users, but allow users to configure their own cloud sync backups for their cloud accounts.

Let verify that the the users have access to Cloud Sync. Go to Control Panel > Users > Edit a User > Applications.

As you can see I’ve granted Allow access to the Cloud Sync under my personal account.

Now when I log into the Synology as my user account and open Cloud Sync I’m prompted to add an account.

As you can see there is a lot of cloud storage options available. Also, Synology does have a feature where you can link all of your cloud accounts in the Synology then see everything in one view and share the files centrally from the Synology. Once you select your cloud vendor and sign you’ll be brought to the configuration of the Cloud Sync configuration.

This is a standard configuration page. Give the connection a name, make it unique just in case you have multiple cloud accounts from the same cloud vendor. Then specify the where on the NAS to store the files. Because this is suppose to be a backup I selected only sync from OneDrive. I’m not going to be using the NAS as a place to make changes in OneDrive. As a Safety measure I also checked “Don’t remove files in the destination folder when they are removed in the source folder.” Because in the event that my account is is comprised and some one deletes my stuff I can easily just re-upload it when I get the account issue straightened out.