We are independent filmmakers and so have many terabytes of data to backup. I looked at other cloud backup services but the initial seeding of over 4TB of data would take over 170 days! I was thinking instead that it might make sense to purchase my own NAS so that I could copy the data at home over a Thunderbolt or USB-3 connection and then move the NAS to my office where it could function as an offsite backup using Syncthing. This would solve the problem with the initial seed, but then allow me to have cloud backup after that. Would this work? What is the proper procedure for doing so? Also, both my wife and I would want to do this on our computers (each of which has a Drobo attached). Is this possible? What issues would be involved in a two computer setup like this? (Note: we are both using MacOS.)
That is a very common setup: Use Syncthing to sync several devices with the device doing the backups (and potentially each other). Then on the device doing the backups (your NAS) you do backups with a dedicated program. Synced devices are not a backup, so unless you do backups at a second location as well, you will not have any off-site backups with this setup.
As for transporting the data physically: Totally makes sense if bandwidth is an issue (and “bandwidth of physical transport” will beat the internet). The initial scan and index exchange between devices will still take some time (limited by CPU most likely), but definitely a lot less than 170days
