I have a server running Debian with 24 TB of storage. I would ideally like to back up all of it, though much of it is torrents, so only the ones with low seeders really need backed up. I know about the 321 rule but it sounds like it would be expensive. What do you do for backups? Also if anyone uses tape drives for backups I am kinda curious about that potentially for offsite backups in a safe deposit box or something.
TLDR: title.
Edit: You have mentioned borg and rsync, and while borg looks good, I want to go with rsync as it seems to be more actively maintained. I would like to also have my backups encrypted, but rsync doesn’t seem to have that built in. Does anyone know what to do for encrypted backups?
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I put the prndl in r and just goose it
I have my BD/DVD/CD collection backed up to S3 Glacier. It’s incredibly cheap, offsite, and they worry about the infrastructure. The amount of Hard drive and infrastructure space you’ll need to back up early that amount will cost you the about the same give or take. Yes it’ll cost a bit in the event of a catastrophic restore, but if I have something happen at the house, at least I have an offsite backup.
How much does Glacier cost you? Last time I checked, some hosts had warm storage for around the same price, at least during Black Friday or New Year sales.
I don’t have nearly that much worth backing up(5TB–and realistically only 2TB is probably critical), but I have a Synology Nas(12TB raid 1) and truenas (zfs striped/mirrored) that I back my stuff to (and they back up to each other).
Then I have a raspberry pi with a USB drive (8tb) at my parents house 4 hours away, that my Synology backs up to (over tailscale).
Oh, and I have a USB HDD(8tb) that I plug in and backup my Synology Nas to and throw in my fireproof safe. But thats a manual backup I do once every quarter or 6 months if I remember. That’s a very very last resort backup.
My offsite is at my parents.
And no, I have not tested it because I don’t know how I’m actually supposed to do that.
Synology Nas(12TB raid 1)
I have to say that I was really surprised that apparently there isn’t a general solution for gluing together different-sized drives in an array reasonably-efficiently other than Synology’s Hybrid RAID. I mean, you can build something that works similarly on a Linux machine, but there apparently isn’t an out-of-the-box software package that does that. It seems like the kind of thing that’d be useful, but…shrugs
I think unRAID does that. But I never looked into it much tbh.
And no, I have not tested it because I don’t know how I’m actually supposed to do that.
depends on what you backup and how.
if it’s just “dumb” files (videos, music pictures etc.), just retrieve them from your backups and check if you can open the files.
complex stuff? probably try to rebuild the complex stuff from a backup and check if it works as expected and is in the state you expect it to be in. how to do that really depends on the complex stuff.
i’d guess for most people it’s enough to make sure to backup dumb files and configurations, so they can rebuild their stuff rather than being able to restore a complex system in exactly the same state it was in before bad things happened.
I backup my /home folder on my PC to my NAS using restic (used to use borg, but restic is more flexible). I backup somewhat important data to an external SSD on a weekly basis and very important data to cloud storage on a nightly basis. I don’t backup my *arr media at all (unless you count the automated snapshots on my NAS), as it’s not really important to me and can simply be redownloaded in most cases.
So I don’t and wouldn’t apply the 321 rule to all data as it’s simply too expensive for the amount of data I have and it’d take months to upload with my non-fiber internet connection. But you should definitely apply it to data that’s important to you.
I have just been using Borg with a Hetzner Storagebox as the target. That has the advantage of being off-site and not using up a lot of space since it deduplicates. It also encrypts the backup. It might take a while for the initial backup at 24TB though depending on your connection.
Damn never heard of them looks great. Is there any catch or is it like a small company that might go out of business in a few years? I still haven’t had to backup more then 4tb but once I do get up to those numbers they might be the best option compared to offsite hard drives like I been doing
I have been using their nextcloud service for several years now and it works great.
is it like a small company that might go out of business in a few years?
Hetzner is one of the largest hosting companies in the world.
They are anything but small. They are probably one of the biggest German hosting companies out there.
As mentioned already, Hetzner is a very big Hoster in Germany. I am a customer since nearly 15 years now and in all that time they also rised the prices only once for the package I use (and I think it was only recently in 2023 or so where it went from 4,90€ to 5,39€). Also their Storage Box seems to be not only one of the cheapest out there I have seen, but as far as I remember, you do not have to pay for the traffic if you want to restore your data, like it is with other hosters. Also they had a good service, were responsive if I opened a Ticket in the past and I can not remember if I had ever problems with the service I use (Web Hosting package).
Can confirm that there is 0 ingress or egress fees, since this is not an S3 container storage server, but a simple FTP server that also has a borg&restic module. So it simply doesnt fall into the e/ingress cost model.
Shit I’ve never heard of Hetzner but their pricing makes de-Googling all my decades of family photos a viable option! Thanks!
…until they change their prices. Always make sure you have a local copy and a way out
to your edit: rsync is a tool to copy/move files, borg is a backup utility. there are scripts that use rsync to create proper backups, but if you want to go by ‘more actively maintained’ you should look into how these scripts are maintained, not rsync itself.
on the other hand - borg is actively maintained, there even are releases in the last two days, one stable and one beta. it also fulfills your ‘encrypted backup’ requirement and has a versioned backups built in.
tl;dr comparing borg backup and rsync is comparing apples and orangesYour right, I’m sold.
I use Kopia to backup all personal data (nextcloud, immich, configs, etc) daily to another disk in the same server and also to backblaze B2. Its not proper 321 but feels good enough. I dont backup downloadable content because its expensive
The software borgbackup does some insane compression.
It is more effective if you backup multiple machines tbh (my 3 linux computers with ~600gb used each get compressed down to a single ~350gb backup, because most of the files are the same programs and data over and over again)
But it might do a decent enough job in your case.
So one of the solutions might be getting a NAS and setting up borgbackup.
You could also get a second one and put it in your parents or best friends home for an offsite backup.
That way you don’t have to buy as large of a drive capacity, but will only have fixed costst (+electricity) instead of ongoing costs for some rented server storage.
I guess that would be about 400$ per such a device, if you get a used office pc and buy new drives for it.
Tape seems to be about half the price per TB, but then you need special reader/writer for it, which are usually connected via SAS and are FUCKING EXPENSIVE (over 4000$ as far as I can see).
It only outscales HDDs in price after like ~600TB
How do you handle the cache invalidation issue with Borg when backing up multiple systems to one repo? For me if I access a Borg repository from multiple computers (and write from each) it has to rebuild the cache each time which can take a long time.
I seperate them by archive name prefix and never had the issue you describe.
Edit: it seems I just never noticed it, but the docu suggest you’re right. Now I am confused myself lol.
big reason why i switched to kopia, borg just doesnt cut it anymore…
Important stuff (about 150G) is synced to all my machines and a b2 Backblaze bucket.
I have a rented seed box for those low seeder torrents.
The stuff I can download again is only on a mirrored lvm pool with an lvmcache. I don’t have any redundancy for my monerod data which is on an nvme.
I’m moving towards an immutable OS with 30 days of snapshots. While not the main reason, it does push one to practicing better sync habits.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage PSU Power Supply Unit RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
[Thread #642 for this sub, first seen 30th Mar 2024, 20:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I have a machine at my parents’ house that has a single 20TB drive in it. I’ll log in once in a while and initiate an rsync to bring that up to current with my RAID at home. The specific reason I do it manually is in case there’s a ransomware attack. I won’t copy bad data. That’s also the reason I start it from the backup machine. The main machine doesn’t connect, the backup machine does, so ransomware wouldn’t cross that virtual boundary.
I would like to replicate your setup in the future. How do you connect between the two machines, using tailscale or something like that?
It’s just over ssh. They’ve both got their own subdomains.
Short answer: figure out how much of that is actually irreplaceable and then find a friend or friends who’d be willing to set aside some of their storage space for your backups in exchange for you doing the same.
Tailscale makes the networking logistics incredibly simple and then you can do the actual backups however you see fit.
Well, I’m just starting with serious backups, AFAIK you only need to backup the data which you can’t replicate.
Low seeded torrents are just hard to get, but not impossible. Personal photos, your notes, any other files generated by you are the ones which need backups.
Ideally you want to backup everything that you didn’t explicitly exclude since otherwise there is always something you forgot.
Well, I have my personal data in a specific folder, everything there is backed up.
General media is in another one, which isn’t included.
do you use a COW fs?, using snapshots could be helpful
Helpful yes, but far from enough. It only helps in some scenarios (like accidental deletes, malware), but not in many others (filesystem corruption, multiple disks dying at once due to e.g. lightning, a bad PSU or a fire).
Offsite backup is a must for data you want to keep.
Just want to note here:
Snapshots are NOT a backup.
While btrfs is quite stable corruption/disk failure can always happen. Bcachefs had a little opsie daisy that caused some FS level corruption. Snapshots won’t help in this case.
Snapshots are great for quick restoration on user error.
bcachefs is very early tho, and the corruption was reversible becuase of the COW nature, but i agree
My use case is basically the same as yours.
I do restic to Wasabi.
I’ve been on restic for a few years now and have never had an issue. I started out using Google Drive for the backend but that was though my college which went away eventually so I swapped over to Wasabi but I’m considering B2.
It’s actively maintained and encrypted.
There are a handful of backends it supports but can be extended by writing to an rclone backend.
