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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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.
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.
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
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
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.
I have been using their nextcloud service for several years now and it works great.
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.
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.
It depends on the value of the data. Can you afford to replace them? Is there anything priceless on there (family photos etc)? Will the time to replace them be worth it?
If its not super critical, raid might be good enough, as long as you have some redundancy. Otherwise, categorizing your data into critical/non-critical and back it up the critical stuff first?
RAID is not backup. Many failure sources from theft over electrical issues to water or fire can affect multiple RAID drives equally, not to mention silent data corruption or accidental deletions.
Its not, but if the value of the data is low, its good enough. There is no point backing up linux isos, but family photos definitely should be properly backed up according to 3-2-1.
Yeah…I’ve never totally lost my main storage and had to recover from backups. But on a number of occasions, I have been able to recover something that was inadvertently wiped. RAID doesn’t provide that.
Also, depending upon the structure of your backup system, if someone compromises your system, they may not be able to compromise your backups.
If you need continuous uptime in the event of a drive failure, RAID is an entirely reasonable thing to have. It’s just…not a replacement for backups.
Oh, all my drives are RAID too, mostly for the convenience of being able to use them while I order a replacement for a failed drive and not having to restore from backup once I get that.
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…
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)
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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
I’ve been using Borg and Hetzner Storage Box. There are some small VPS hosts that actually beat Hetzner’s pricing but I have been happy with Hetzner so am staying there for now. With 24TB of data you could also look at Hetzner’s SX64 dedicated server. It has a 6 core Ryzen cpu and 4x 16TB HDD’s for 81 euro/month. You could set it up as RAID 10 which would give you around 29 TiB of usable storage, and then you also have a fairly beefy processor that you can use for transcoding and stuff like that. You don’t want to seed from it since Hetzner is sticky about complaints that they might get.
Tape drives are too expensive unless you have 100s of TB of data, I think. Hard drives are too unreliable. If you leave one in a closet for a few years, there’s a good chance it won’t spin back up.
for 81 euro/month.
You can probably find something cheaper from their auction servers.
I’ve got a storage VPS with HostHatch for my backups. It’s one of their Black Friday deals from a few years ago - 10TB storage for $10/month. Not sure they’ll offer that pricing again, but they did have something similar for around double the price during sales last year (still a good deal!)
Tape drives are too expensive unless you have 100s of TB of data, I think
The drives are expensive, and some manufacturers have expensive proprietary software, but the tapes themselves are cheaper per TB than hard drives, and they usually have a 20 or 30 year life guarantee. People seem to think tapes is old technology but modern tapes can fit 18TB uncompressed (they say 45 TB compressed but idk).
The default tier of AWS glacier uses tape, which is why data retrieval takes a few hours from when you submit the request to when you can actually download the data, and costs a lot.
The default tier of AWS glacier uses tape, which is why data retrieval takes a few hours from when you submit the request to when you can actually download the data, and costs a lot.
AFAIK Glacier is unlikely to be tape based. A bunch of offline drives is more realistic scenario. But generally it’s not public knowledge unless you found some trustworthy source for the tape theory?
I might be crazy but I have a 20TB WD Red Pro in a padded, water proof, locking, case that I take a full backup on and then drive it over to a family members 30m away once a month or so.
It’s a full encrypted backup of all my important stuff in a relatively different geographic location.
All of my VM data backs up hourly to my NAS as well. Which then gets backed up onto the large drive monthly.
Monthly granularity isn’t that good to be fair but it’s better than nothing. I should probably back up the more important rapidly changing stuff online daily.
30m away
30 minutes, 30 miles, or 30 metres?
Yes.
I’m sure one can reasonably infer that I do not mean 30 meters.
Conveniently at highway speeds 30 minutes and 30 miles away are essentially equal.
I’ll try and use appropriate notation next time
I was just joking :)
30 minutes can vary a lot depending on traffic. If there’s traffic, it can take me 30-40 minutes to get home from work even though it’s only 11 miles away and ~15 mins with no traffic.
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 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
As of today I’m actually in a lucky position where I am now able to set up a secondary NAS at my brother in laws and use that as a backup server that I can back up to essentially in real time.
All it’ll cost me is the hardware and the electricity.
What I use is Borg. I use Borg to backup the server to a local NAS. Then I have a NAS at my grand parents house which I use to store the backups of the NAS it self.
