Using Telnyx S3 Storage with Synology Cloud Sync

Offsite Backup

It is impossible to overstate the importance of a robust backup and recovery strategy, and cloud storage is an attractive solution and an effective alternative to tape or disk that doesn't suffer from the human factor (Q: Where's Friday's tape? A: Oh, I left it in the machine.)

GEN do provide cloud based backups as part of our Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions, but if have a Synology NAS and you're looking for a more cost effective solution for small business use, then Telnyx have a very attractive solution, and in this article we're going to walk you through the setup.

Telnyx S3 Storage

Telnyx is a well-known communications provider based in Chicago, USA but they have a global presence. GEN has been a Telnyx customer for some time and we regularly refer customers to them for SIP trunking, but that's not all they do.

Actually the product portfolio is extensive, but today we're just looking at Storage, which at time of writing was $0.006 per GB/month and 10GB free of charge, which is fantastic value for money, and an easy introduction to cloud storage. Product/Pricing Link.

S3 or not to S3

S3 storage, or Simple Storage Service was first developed by Amazon in 2006, but it's slowly grown in both support and popularity, and is now the most widely used storage protocol for cloud storage.

If you want cloud storage from GEN, then we can provide it as S3, iSCSI, NFS, SMB, CIFS, and more, but in all fairness S3 is the most simple to implement with the others all having some degree of configuration complexity that's way beyond this article.

How S3 works

S3 stores data in 'buckets', which you can think of as 'folders' in a more traditional filesystem. Within these buckets are objects, which again you can analagise as 'files' in a traditional filesystem.

Within these buckets, objects are stored with a key (the name), the value (the contents), some metadata, and an access control list.

You *can* mount an S3 bucket as a filesystem on Linux using s3fs, and then use it like any normal filesystem, but this often isn't the best way to utilise it. With S3, in most cases you'll be charged for the storage, and for data transfer and so you need to economise on this transfer, and even if transfer isn't charged you should still handle this in the most economical way.

Considerations

At the time of writing, Telnyx only have storage in the USA, which needs consideration if you're going to be storing any data that's in scope for GDPR. You can store data outside of the UK/EU and still be GDPR compliant, but your privacy notice should be updated to include this provision if it doesn't already, and there is an obligation to notify if you retrospectively change it. Either-way you will need to ensure that suitable encryption is deployed to protect that data once it leaves your direct control. If you are unsure what is and what isn't in scope or need advice on how to fully comply with GDPR in an out of country scenario then feel free to contact us for free advice.

Synology

GEN are Synology Partners and we supply a fair volume of Synology solutions because they're high performance and rock solid. We have our own Synology cloud backup service, but you are not limited to using us. Out of the box your Synology NAS supports:

• Alibaba Cloud OSS
• Azure Storage
• Baidu Cloud
• Backblaze B2
• Box
• Dropbox (& Team Space)
• Google Cloud / Google Drive
• HiCloud S3
• HiDrive
• JD Cloud OSS
• MegaDisk
• Microsoft OneDrive / Sharepoint
• OpenStack swift
• Rackspace
• S3 Storage
• Synology C2
• Tencent Cloud COS
• WebDAV
• Yandex Disk

So you've plenty of options, and Synology support pretty much any S3 storage provider. This is provided by their own CloudSync application, which allows you to sync a local folder (or folders) to a cloud provider, including Telnyx.

The Setup

The Telnyx Portal

First, login to your Telnyx account, if you don't have one, you can easily register for one, and make sure you've generated some API Keys, these are important. You will then have an API Key and a Public Key.

Now select Storage from the left menu, and Create Bucket.

Give the bucket a name, its lower case but it can be anything really.

Select the Region, and it makes sense to select the one closest to you physically. At the time of writing the only options here are USA based, but I suspect Telnyx will increase this over time.

Bucket Versioning - Can be enabled if you need it, or disabled if not. Versioning will however contribute towards your storage total so choose carefully.

Tags can be added if you're going to have many buckets, otherwise don't.

Click Create to create your bucket.

The Synology NAS

On your NAS first select or create a shared folder on the drive of your choice. This is the folder that will be synchronised (mirrored) on the S3 storage. Assign access permissions as you normally would.

Now open Synology Cloud Sync (Install it from the Package Centre if you don't already have it), and you'll see a list of cloud providers. If you don't then you already have one or more setup so click the large + at the bottom.

Select S3 Storage and click Next

Under S3 Server, select "Custom Server URL"

In server Address, enter the region name (e.g us-central-1, us-west-1, or us-east-1) followed by .telnyxstorage.com. So you'll end up with a server address that looks something like;

us-central-1.telnyxstorage.com

Leave the Signature Version at v2

The Access Key; is your API key from the Telnyx Portal.

The Secret Key; is actually the Public Key from the Telnyx Portal.

Now click the Dropdown to the right of Bucket Name, and you should see your Telnyx Bucket that we created in the previous section. Select it and then select Next. If you don't see it, or you get an error, go back and double check everything.

Now on the next page, Give your connection a Name in "Connection Name", this can be anything but make it something descriptive.

Click the folder Icon to the right of Local Path, and select the shared folder you selected or created at the start of this section.

Unless you have a specific reason to change it, leave Remote Path as Root Folder. (If you want to have multiple local folders synchronised to one bucket, then you should untick root folder, and create a folder for each local folder you intend to sync).

The Sync Direction depends on your use case. Generally bi-directional is preferred, but if you're synchronising a hyperbackup destination folder (Yes, you can), then you can only set this to upload local changes only, and in this case you should also NOT tick, don't remove files in the destination folder....

Part size, specifies the size of the data chunks that are synchronised, leave this as 128MB unless you have a specific use case to change it. If, for example you were synchronising millions of tiny files, then you might want to reduce this.

Enable Advanced consistency check if you need it, I recommend you do.

Enable Data Encryption unless you have a specific case that doesn't require it. If you're in the UK/EU then you should definitely use this if you're synchronising anything sensitive.

Click Next

You will now be asked for your encryption password, choose a strong one and keep it secure. Then click Next.

All Setup

As your sync configuration is created, your browser will download a file called Key.zip. You need to store this file safely, but securely. You may need this file in the future if your NAS crashes, or you upgrade etc. You also need to keep the password that you used, and you can keep them together, but KEEP THEM AND NOT ON THE SAME NAS. In the event of a failure of your NAS, you will not be able to restore from your cloud backup without the file and the password. If you loose them neither GEN nor Telnyx can help you.

Using your S3 bucket

Your all setup now, and your Cloud Sync application will automatically synchronise anything you place into your local folder, to your S3 storage at Telnyx. This provides a rock solid off-site backup should a disaster occur and you didn't splash out on a reassuringly expensive GEN Disaster Recovery Plan ;)

From your Cloud Sync application, you will see a large tick, and Up to Date. Above this you can change various settings and we'll cover some here because you may want to.

Task List

This will show you the task, that is setup to synchronise from your local folder to the S3 bucket. You should not need to change this, but its worth knowing that you can 'add' to this to synchronise more folders, but if you delete all the tasks it will unlink your connection to Telnyx so always have at least one.

Schedule

By default, cloudSync will check for changes every 10 minutes. If for whatever reason you want to change this you can, and, for example, only have it synchronise overnight, or between certain hours. You may have a slow internet connection which makes this a logical change - but do consider that by changing this to overnight only, changes will only be uploaded at that time. If you have a NAS failure in the day, the days's changes are lost.

Settings

Settings provides some useful features, such as setting a bandwidth limit for uploads and downloads, which can help in a slow connectivity environment, as well as allowing the change of part sizes, and polling intervals.

Logs

Synchronisations are logged and shown here, you can refer to this to verify that synchronisation is working as expected. If you're experiencing difficulties, then the GEN Helpdesk is always available, and Telnyx have great support so reach out if in need.

Conclusion

Synology CloudSync combined with Telnyx is a great cloud backup solution, and If you're already a Telnyx customer then at the time of writing, 10GB is included free of charge! We trust Telnyx to support our clients with SIP trunking, and more recently Storage, but they do offer a wide range of services so check those out. If you need something specific that's not immediately obvious, or you want something custom, for example using their voice and messaging API's, then talk to your account manager and see what GEN can do to provide that.

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