Contents

Introduction
Phase 1 – Create the Backblaze B2 Bucket
Phase 2 – Install and Configure Synology CloudSync
Phase 3 – Configure Veeam Backup Repository
Phase 4 – Create the Veeam Backup Job
Phase 5 – Testing and Tuning
Summary

Introduction

B2 Cloud Storage is an object storage service offered by Backblaze that enables users and organisations to upload files to their heart’s content billed on a per monthly basis using a pay for what you consume model. Backblaze has evolved this object storage service ‘B2’ out of the already successful $5 a month unlimited backup plan which was built from the ground up using Storage Pods. Storage pods are designed in-house by Backblaze, leveraging consumer grade hardware and hard drives in a purpose-built chassis designed to minimise costs, reduce footprint and yield the best dollar per GB possible. For example, using 4TB drives, they can achieve a cost per GB as low as $0.036.

These Backblaze pods, which are now up to revision 6, are literally filled to the brim with hard drives, over 60 of them in fact in a 4U chassis. I recommend that you go and check out more on these awesome units here.

So, Backblaze takes these Storage Pods a step further for B2, by grouping 20 at a time into a Backblaze Vault it enables them to optimise reliability and durability of the entire system.

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Summary
So Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, in a nutshell, it works similar to Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure, allowing us to store vast quantities of data in the cloud but does it for 1/4th the cost of your typical object storage provider.

Because B2 doesn’t include any client software to interface with any time we access the storage we need to use either the web GUI, API or CLI. In the case of Veeam, this means we need to rely on a ‘cloud gateway’ which there are several options available that are compatible with B2, in this particular article, I have explored configuring a Synology DS1812 with the CloudSync package.

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Phase 1 – Create the Backblaze B2 Bucket

Ok, to get started we need to know that storage for a Backblaze B2 account is grouped into buckets. Each bucket is a container that holds files. We can think of buckets as the top-level folders in our B2 Cloud Storage account. There is no limit to the number of files in a bucket, but there is a limit of 100 buckets per account.

So I’m going to assume that you have already created a Backblaze account and are ready to start creating B2 buckets. In my case, I had already created an existing bucket for another test (which I have blurred out) but I will be creating a new bucket specifically for our Veeam backup files.

Let’s begin, first, we need to open up the Backblaze web portal and signing into our account.
Once signed in we need to create a bucket.

Create B2 Bucket

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• We don’t  need to enable ‘Align backup file data blocks’  as my Synology is not configured to perform de-duplication (I don’t believe it is even capable of such a feature)
• We don’t need to enable ‘Decompress backup data blocks before storing’ as again, my Synology is not configured to perform de-duplication.
• We enable ‘Use per-VM backup files’ because, without it, backup jobs that contained multiple VMs would result in a single large backup file. By enabling this option, it splits the VMs out into their own backup file. This is important as it makes uploading and download backups much more manageable.

Next, we need to choose a mount server, in my homelabs I have left this as default but considerations should be made if this is for production. Ideally, it would be a Veeam proxy that has a good connection to the repository.

Review and finish adding the SMB Synology Shared Folder.