Selfhosted

Local storage + a Veeam VBR VM

Restic (or rustic) and Hetzner storage box 🤩

First copy on offline USB disk on my server itself. Disk is turned on, backup done, disk goes off. Once a day.

Second copy on a USB drive connected to an OpenWRT router of my home, the furthest away from the server (in case of fire, I could be able to grab either of the two).

Third copy offsite on a VPS.

I use restic & backrest with great satisfaction.

A server in a friend/family member's home. All of the cloud based backups I've encountered seem either unaffordable or have annoying limitations.

3,2,1.

My nas is a Synology with raid.

1. Backup with versions to a single large HD via USB. This ransomware protection or accidental deletion. (Rsync)
2. Offsite copy to backblaze b2.One version. (Rsync) (~$6/month) This would be natual disaster protection. flood, fire.
3. Second not raided cheaper Synology at a friends on the other coast. This has ~3 versions. Sorta the backup to the first two.

I use the unlimited consumer backblaze with private key on a windows VM. I provision a 40tb iscsi connection to the VM from a NAS and all kinds of various homelab systems and devices store thier backups there. Works great and is the cheapest possible option at $9 a month.

Nobody that uses Wasabi?

I started this past year with iDrive because of their incredible welcome deal if you switch from another service. I started a trial with Dropbox with the same email and sent them the requested screenshots for verification- they approved it. Spending $10 for the first year of 5TB

It's pretty slow on uploading, but it works. Customer service is attentive and caring. Probably going to go to a local NAS and a different online solution within the year. It's a nice cheap padding as I learn how to do this right. The intro deal might be worth it for you, too, though I don't think it's the best long-term option

I use restic to backblaze b2.

I've been using Restic to Backblaze B2.

I don't really trust B2 that much (I think it is mostly a single-DC kind of storage) but it is reasonably priced and easy to use. Plus as long as their failures aren't correlated with mine it should be fine.

My current strategy might be a bit over the top,but it works.

I have two main entities that contain data worth backing up - the NAS and to a much smaller extend my Proxmox cluster (which is partly within my house,partly at Hetzner).

User PCs do not have any User data saved, they all work with network drives mapped to the NAS, only irrelevant amounts of data are stored on them that gets backed up via Free File Sync. For the Notebooks I use the same concept as we are using a WG VPN 99,9% of the time anyway,but some important folders get also synched via Free File Sync for offline use if no mobile connection is available.

For proper backups I have basically three classes of data that I maintain: Prio 1: The real real important stuff. Photos of once in a lifetime events, important documents, etc. Prio 2: The stuff you still don't want to loose. All other photos, the scanned documents, home folders, VMs/LXX backups, configurations, etc. Prio3: Everything else,mostly data that could be downloaded again. Easily. Movies, etc.

Prio3 data is currently only living in the NAS and does get backed up once in a while on a external hard drive. It's mainly backed up as I am lazy and in case the NAS craps out I don't want to reload all the stuff...that would take months.

Prio2 data gets backed up fully: For the NAS data: It gets backed up to B2 with versioning according to my needs (usually 3d,2w,3m,1y,but that depends highly on the source). Additionally full external hard drive backups every few weeks. (I would kill to get my hands on a proper tape drive again,I had one back in the day,but it was used and old and died) Some data is also stored on Synology C2 atm,but I will replace that soon with another cloud provider, likely Hetzner.

For Proxmox: Basically the same, but I use TUXIS instead of B2 and Hetzner instead of Synology C2. Additionally I have a old PC with Proxmox backup server which turns on once a week and safes the whole cluster before turning off again. In the future this PC is planned to replace the External hard disk's,but currently hard drive prices are insane.

For the P1 data: Same as above,but it's definitely staying on a second cloud provider. Additionally I also create archive blue ray disk's every few month. (Usually every 4). These go into the safe deposit box at my bank and additionally to a second storage location.

And of course I have detailed instructions about this in my will so even if both my wife and I die my kid can figure it out.

@gedaliyah If you're not married to managed cloud services, services like rsync.net or a Hetzner storage box work very well. They require more effort, but you have complete control and can do some fun things (like using rclone's crypt module with them). Plus rsync.net is super useful if your sources use ZFS.

Of the cloud providers, Backblaze is the one that anecdotally seems most popular.

I use borgbackup to create backups. I point backups to another home computer and borgbase.com. Borg itself is an amazing tool. I think you should learn how it works even if it doesnt end up being the best fit for you.

I've been using pcloud. They do one time upfront payments for 'lifetime' cloud storage. Catch a sale and it's ~$160/TB. For something long term like backups it seems unbeatable. To the point I sort of don't expect them to actually last forever, but if they last 2-3 years it's a decent deal still.

Use rclone to upload my files, honestly not ideal though since it's meant for file synchronisation not backups. Also they are dog slow. Downloading my 4TBs takes ~10 days.

For devices like laptops and PCs. I use Urbackup to make backups.

For all the apps I host on Kubernetes I setup S3 backups to self hosted Minio.

I like S3 because I only pay for what I use and it has auto storage tiering.

I use Backblaze B2 through my Synology NAS to offsite my important data. Most things though I just backup locally and accept the risk of needing to rebuild certain things (like most of my movie/TV media files since I can just re-rip my physical media, and the storage costs are not worth the couple of days of time in that unlikely case).

I really think this is key when thinking about your backup strategy that is specific to self hosting compared to enterprise operations. The costs come out of our pockets with no revenue to back it up. Managing backups for self hosting IMO is just as much about understanding your risk appetite and then choosing a strategy to match that. For example I keep just single copy in B2, since the failure mode I’m looking to protect against is catastrophic failure of my NAS which holds my main backups and media. I then use Proton Drive and OneDrive to backup secrets for my 2FA setups and encryption for my B2 bucket. This isn’t how I would do it at work (we have a fair more robust, but much more expensive setup). But my costs for B2 are around $15/mo which I am fine with. When I tried keeping multiple copies it had grown to over $50/mo before I cared enough to really rethink things (the cost of the hobby I told myself).

I’m still looking for a case that can hold a Pi and a 3.5” drive that I can set up at someone else’s house.

Timely post.

I was about to make one because iDrive has decided to double their prices, probably because they could.

$30/tb/year to $50/tb/year is a pretty big jump, but they were also way under the market price so capitalism gonna capital and they're "optimizing" or someshit.

I've love to be able to push my stuff to some other provider for closer to that $30, but uh, yeah, no freaking clue who since $60/tb/year seems to be the more average price.

Alternately, a storage option that's not S3-based would also probably be acceptable. Backups are ~300gb, give or take, and the stuff that does need S3-style storage I can stuff in Cloudflare's free tier.

I've been using rsync.net for a while now. It's been stable, fast, and relatively inexpensive. There's also the benefit that it's easy to script automated backups directly to it. For more Dropbox-like functionality, I have a Nextcloud instance that uses rsync.net as external storage. It's been great so far!

After some research on here and reddit about 6 months so, I settled on Borgbase and its been pretty good. I also manually save occasionally to proton drive but you're right to give up on that as a solution!

The hardest part was choosing the backup method and properly setting up Borg or restic on my machine properly, especially with docker and databases. I have ended up with adding db backup images to each container with an important db, saving to a specific folder. Then that and all the files are backed up by restic to an attached external drive at well as borgbase. This happens at a specific time in the morning and found a restic action to stop all docker containers first, back them up, then spin them back up. I am find the guides that I used if it's helpful to you.

I also checked my backups a few times and found a few small problems I had to fix. I got the message from order users several times that your backups are useless unless you regularly test them.

I use iDrive, 20TB for a couple hundred bucks a year. I've not found anything that compares to that in pricing. Backblaze I think it's about $1600 a year for the same storage and the major cloud providers are much higher than that. I view cloud backups as the the last line of defense in the backup strategy. So all the nice features that most providers offer at a significant price increase just don't make sense to me as I won't use them. I have the iDrive Linux app running it detects what's new in the monitored directories and shoves them up to the cloud hopefully to never be needed.

My backup plan includes Backrest (restic) up to B2. So far so good!