I’ve been considering paying for a European provider, mounting their service with rclone
, and thus being transparent to most anything I host.
How do y’all backup your data?
I do an automated nightly backup via restic to Backblaze B2. Every month, I manually run a script to copy the latest backup from B2 to two local HDDs that I keep offline. Every half a year I recover the latest backup on my PC to make sure everything works in case I need it. For peace of mind, my automated backup includes a health check through healthchecks.io, so if anything goes wrong, I get a notification.
It’s pretty low-maintenance and gives a high degree of resilience:
- A ransomware attack won’t affect my local HDDs, so at most I’ll lose a month’s worth of data.
- A house fire or server failure won’t affect B2, so at most I’ll lose a day’s worth of data.
restic has been very solid, includes encryption out of the box, and I like the simplicity of it. Easily automated with cron etc. Backblaze B2 is one of the cheapest cloud storage providers I could find, an alternative might be Wasabi if you have >1TB of data.
How much are you backing up? Admittedly backblaze looks cheap but at $6 Tb leaves me with $84 pcm or just over $1000 per year.
I’m seriously considering a rpi3 with a couple of external disk in an outbuilding instead of cloud
Oh, I think we’re talking different orders of magnitude here. I’m in the <1TB range, probably around 100GB. At that size, the cost is negligible.
Isn’t backblaze is like $6 per TB 🤔🤔🤔
So $216 a year?
$6 x 14Tb = $84 month x 12 months = $1008 per year, or did I miss read the prices?
Sorry, I thought you or somebody said they store 3TB. Probably I’m mistaken, sorry 🥲
I have my data backed up locally on an HDD, though I’m planning on building a server machine to hold more data with parity (not just for backups). Important data I have backed up in Google drive and Proton drive, both encrypted before upload. It isn’t that big, I don’t back up media or anything in the cloud. Oh and I have some stuff in mega, but I stopped adding to that years ago. I should probably delete that account, thanks for the reminder!
Two hard drives of the same size, one on site and one off site.
Where do you keep your off-site one? Like a friend or family member’s house?
At home and at the shop where I work. At work the drives are actually stored in a Faraday cage.
I keep one in a bank deposit box. It costs like $10/year, fireproof, climate controlled, and exactly the right size for a 3.5" disk. Rotate every couple of months, because it is like 10-15 minute process to get into the vault.
So your backed up data can be as old as a couple of months and requires manual interaction? I guess that’s better than nothing, but I’m looking for something more automated. I’m not sure what my options are for cloud storage or if they are safe from deletion. Or if having it in a closet in a friends house is really the best option.
I have a live local backup to guard against hardware/system failure. I figure the only reason I’d have to go to the off-site backup is destruction of my home, and if that ever happens then recreating a couple of months worth of critical data will not be an undue burden.
If I had work or consulting product on my home systems, I’d probably keep a cloud backup by daily rsync, but I’m not going to spend the bandwidth to remote backup the whole system off site. It’s bad enough bringing down a few tens of gigabytes - sending up several terabytes, even in the background, just isn’t practical for me.
Either works, if you dont trust them encryption is always an option
Nightly backups to an on-prem NAS. Then an rsync to a second off-site NAS at my folks house.
Tape is the best medium for archiving data.
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I bought an incredibly overkill tape system a few years ago and then the power supply exploded in it and I never bothered to replace it. Still, definitely worth it
Yes, tape has very steep entry costs and requires maintenance and storage.
Most of the time it doesn’t make sense for a person to use it, but rather a corporate entity that needs to backup petabytes of data multiple times a day.
I really want to use tape for backups, but holy expensive. Those tape drives are thousands of dollars.
Damn, the last time I thought about this (20 years ago) I was able to buy a tape drive for a PC for like … I wanna say $250-300?? I forget the format, it was very very common though and tapes were dirt cheap, maybe $10-12 a pop. Worked great, if you were willing to sit around and swap tapes out as needed.
I think the problem is that normal consumers wouldn’t ever buy a tape drive, so the only options still being produced are enterprise grade. The tapes are still pretty cheap, but the drives are absurd.
So tape doesn’t make sense for the typical person, unless you don’t have to buy the equipment and store i.
But, if you’re even a small company it becomes cheaper to use tape.
Companies don’t like deleting data. Ever. In fact some industries have laws that say they can’t delete data.
For example, the company I work in is small, but old. Our accounting department alone requires complex automated processes to do things each day that require data to be backed up.
From the beginning of time. I shit you not. There is no compression even.
And at the drop of a hat, the IT dept needs to be able to implement a backup from any time in the past. Although this almost never happens outside of the current pay cycle, they need to have the option available.
The best way they have to facilitate this (I hate it - like I said they’re old) is to simply write everything multiple times a night. And it’s everything since we started using digital storage. Yes, it’s overkill and makes no sense, but that’s the way it is for us. And that’s the way it is for a lot of companies.
So, when we’re talking about that amount of data, and tape having a storage cost advantage of 4:1 over disk, it more than pays for all the overhead for enterprise level backups.
I have two machines that back up to a local server using Borg. That whole server in turn backs up to Jottacloud using restic with encryption enabled.
By the way, I wouldn’t use rclone for backups. Use restic or something similar that does incremental backups. Because if you do rclone and then later discover that some files were corrupted locally, then your files are gone. With incremental backups you would still be able to retrieve them.
Oh, or do you mean backing up the stuff that is on the cloud?
zfs send
Is that a new crypto?
I sync all my files across 4 different computers in my house (rsync and Nextcloud) and then backups on OneDrive and Google Drive.
4 different computers? Wow…
The 4 different computers are my vr desktop, my laptop, my home server, and my wife’s computer 🤪
I wrote my own thing. I didn’t understand how the standard options worked so I gave up.
Usb drive
I use borg
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For a long time I did 1 hot copy (e.g. on my laptop), 1 LAN/homelab copy (e.g. Syncthing on a VM), and 1 cloud copy … less a backup scheme than a redundancy scheme, albeit with file versioning turned on on the homelab copy so I could be protected from oopsies.
I’m finally teaching myself
duplicity
in order to set up a backup system for a webdev business I’m working on … it ain’t bad.I am a simple man, and like simple setups that’s easy to maintain.
When it comes to my pictures and private data, I have them on one portable disk, that I rsync over to another portable disk on a monthly basis.
When it comes to my application logs and data, I back them up to a S3-compatible bucket with
s3-cmd
, through the frequency of my choosing as a cron-job. The S3 bucket is configured for “write once, read many” mechanism to avoid alternation of the data. And if the cron-job fails, I get a notification through ntfy.Quite simple, and robust.
Illuminated Binary Manuscripts.