I was actually looking for something like this. I have one computer that I want to back up to both local hard drives and to the cloud.
A NAS is great, because you can back up to it and have the backup stored on local hard drives, but it also has a CPU and it can be responsible for uploading the data to the cloud. This is better to do from a dedicated device, especially if you are uploading large amounts of data with limited bandwidth, which I am.
The constraint is that locally backing up to a NAS is slow, even though it is sitting next to my computer. Instead of buying into 10GbE networking, it’d be nice to just use a Thunderbolt cable.
Running FreeNAS on a 1GbE network and I wouldn’t call it slow at all. The initial back is much much faster than my 1TB personal media library I sometimes backup to OneDrive. I think I have 3TB of video from Usenet that is downloaded onto a windows box, uses a 10 year old intel as an unpack scratch pad, and then is stored on the NAS box. Sure the initial library transfer is slow but if you can use a wire it’s not that slow. Certainly not Comcast 25Mb upload slow.
Agree about 10Gb devices being expensive especially if you’re invested in the UniFi ecosystem. I’m tempted to do a direct 10Gb SFP+ connection using used intel or Mellanox 10Gb NICs but I haven’t pulled the trigger. 10Gb Thunderbolt NICs are too expensive and give off questionable amounts of heat.
SFP+ is the way to go right now and gives you options. Fiber, DAC (copper), or Ethernet.
A NAS is great, because you can back up to it and have the backup stored on local hard drives, but it also has a CPU and it can be responsible for uploading the data to the cloud. This is better to do from a dedicated device, especially if you are uploading large amounts of data with limited bandwidth, which I am.
The constraint is that locally backing up to a NAS is slow, even though it is sitting next to my computer. Instead of buying into 10GbE networking, it’d be nice to just use a Thunderbolt cable.