If you’ve ever tried running a self-hosted backup system across different networks, you know the pain: NAT and firewalls turn a simple idea into a weekend-eating nightmare.
Tools like Bacula or old-school backup servers assume a flat private network. But that’s rarely reality anymore. Today your machines live everywhere, at home, in the office, across different clouds, and trying to connect them without exposing ports or juggling firewall rules gets messy fast.
So… how do you actually back them up without compromising security or spending hours setting up VPNs?
The Challenge: Backups Behind NAT
Here’s the scenario many IT admins and developers run into:
- Multiple servers scattered across different networks
- Need to manage all backups centrally and keep an eye on success/error logs
- Don’t want client machines exposed to the public internet
- No appetite for fragile VPN setups or risky firewall tweaks
When people search for “self-hosted remote backup solution that works behind NAT,” this is exactly the problem they’re trying to solve.
How SimpleBackups Solves This
We built the Agent + Command Center model at SimpleBackups precisely for this use case.
- ✅ No open ports on your servers
- ✅ No inbound firewall rules or IP allowlists
- ✅ Works seamlessly behind NAT and firewalls
- ✅ Centralized monitoring and scheduling
- ✅ Compatible with local, cloud, or hybrid storage
Here’s how it works: your agents sit safely inside private networks and pull encrypted instructions from the Command Center. You stay in control, without exposing anything to the internet.
Why This Is Different From Traditional Tools
Old-school backup systems expect you to:
- configure complex networking,
- open inbound ports,
- or run VPN tunnels across every environment.
With SimpleBackups, it’s closer to how modern RMM (Remote Monitoring & Management) tools work: lightweight, secure, and cloud-native by design.
You decide whether your data stays local, syncs to your own infrastructure, or heads to the cloud. Either way, you get full visibility, alerting, and reporting, all from one dashboard.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve been fighting NAT, firewalls, and messy networking setups just to get backups running, you don’t need to keep hacking together solutions.
With SimpleBackups, you finally have a self-hosted remote backup solution that works seamlessly behind NAT, no firewall headaches, no open ports, just reliable backups that you can actually trust.
👉 Start your free trial today and simplify your backup workflow.