My Backup Strategy: Pulling Data to a Centralized NAS

I recently bought a NAS, on which I have installed TrueNAS, which easily becomes the backbone of an entire Homelab. It is where all my important data is stored, it is where I take backups of my data, and it is where I can expose network drives.

I want to have a solid backup strategy for my Homelab, and in that regard, I have decided to perform periodic PULLs to back up the data stored on some of my servers. Essentially, the NAS is set up to pull the data from the servers instead of having the servers push the data onto the NAS.

By pulling the data, I can keep the backup configuration more or less centralized on my NAS and have a much better overview of what is backed up and what is not - since anything not on my NAS won’t be backed up.

Using TrueNAS, I can set up Rsync Tasks to automatically pull data on a predefined schedule. Furthermore, I only need to set up an SSH key on my NAS, after which I can allow the SSH key on any server that has data requiring backup. This means I only need to distribute the public SSH key to my servers instead of configuring each server to connect to my NAS. I like the peace of mind of having my NAS connect to my servers, so it basically “holds the keys to my kingdom” instead of leaving them scattered across various servers.

Lastly, by centralizing all storage on my NAS, I can easily back up all my data to the Cloud from a single place, reducing the difficulty of maintaining backups