this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] jubilationtcornpone 12 points 10 months ago

You don't have to worry about the backups. It the data recovery that will require divine intervention.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Jesus is my ~~copilot~~ raid parity.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

of course /s

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

It protects against drive failure. That is the threat I am most worried about, so it's fine for me.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That's the thing. I don't.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Two hard drives of the same size, one on site and one off site.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Where do you keep your off-site one? Like a friend or family member's house?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

At home and at the shop where I work. At work the drives are actually stored in a Faraday cage.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

I wrote my own thing. I didn't understand how the standard options worked so I gave up.

https://github.com/danhab99/backup-brute

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Tape is the best medium for archiving data.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I really want to use tape for backups, but holy expensive. Those tape drives are thousands of dollars.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Manually plug in a few disks every once in a while and copy the important stuff. Disks are offline for the most part.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (7 children)

Local to synology. Synology to AWS with synology's backup app. It costs me pennies per day.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I keep important files on my NAS, and use Borgbackup with Borgmagic for backups. I've got a storage VPS with HostHatch that's $10/month for 10TB space (was a special Black Friday deal a few years ago).

Make sure you don't just have one backup copy. If you discover that a file was corrupted three weeks ago, you should be able to restore the file from a three week old backup. rsync and rclone will only give you a single backup. Borg dedupes files across backups so storing months of daily backups often isn't a problem, especially if the files rarely change.

Also make sure that ransomware or an attacker can't mess up your backup. This means it should NOT be mounted as a file system on the client, and ideally the backup system has some way of allowing new backups while disallowing deleting old ones from the client side. Borg's "append only" mode is perfect for this. Even if an attacker were to get onto your client system and try to delete the backups, Borg's append-only mode just marks them as deleted until you run a compact on the server side, so you can easily recover.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

The only type of data I care about is photos and video I’ve taken. Everything else is replaceable.

My phone —> immich —> backblaze b2, and some Google drive.

Linux isos I can always redownload.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

rclone to dropbox and opendrive for things I care about like photo backups and RAW backups, and an encrypted rclone volume to both for things that need to be backed up, but also kept secure, such as scans of my tax returns, mortgage paperwork, etc. I maintain this script for the actual rclone automation via cron

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Proxmox backs up to pbs and pbs is synced to B2 with rclone.

Other stuff is restic to b2.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I have a cheap 2 bay synology NAS that acts solely as a backup server for my main NAS in an offsite location as well as a USB drive locally.

Backups run every night with duplicacy

I exclude media files (movies, TV shows,...) from my backup routine due to the sheer amounts of data accumulated over time and the fact that most of it can be re-aquired using public sources in case disaster recovery is needed

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I have a Synology NAS that holds all my important data. Then it does nightly backups to Synology C2.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Device sync to nextcloud -> rsync data & db onto NAS -> nightly backup to rsync.net and quarterly offsite/offline HDD swaps.

I also copy Zoneminder recordings, configs, some server logs, and my main machine’s ~/ onto the NAS.

The offsite HDD is just a bog standard USB 4TB drive with one big LUKS2 volume on it.

It’s all relatively simple. It’s easy to complicate your backups to the point where you rely on Veeam checkpointing your ESXI disks and replicating incrementals to another device that puts them all back together… but it’s much better to have a system that’s simple and just works.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Synology NAS where all computers get backed up to locally. Restic for Linux, Time Machine for Mac, active backup for Windows.

NAS backs most of its data (that I trust enough to put on the cloud) encrypted to Google drive every night, occasionally I back the NAS up to an external 8tb hard-drive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
NAS Network-Attached Storage
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

[Thread #188 for this sub, first seen 5th Oct 2023, 00:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I sync all my files across 4 different computers in my house (rsync and Nextcloud) and then backups on OneDrive and Google Drive.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I miss back in the day. Used to be able to store all my stuff on CD-R's, hell before that it was floppy's. File sizes have grown exponentially, programs/apps all have huge sizes. Pictures and videos is my biggest issue, but I'd also like to backup games that I've downloaded so I don't have to download again. I can backup old games no problem, but modern games? Many are 100+ GB now, and in time they all will be and 200GB will be the standard, then a terabyte and more.

Anyway, until I can afford and find a 20 tb sad I'm just using DVDs for everything but games and large programs. Quick to write, solid, tangeable etc. If I could afford a bunch of flash drives I'd probably do that instead.

If you can afford it and it's important data I'd ofc recommend backing up to a large SSD, THEN to a cloud (or more) as a failsafe.. then also using flash drives/DVD's etc. For an additional failsafe for the super important stuff.

I mean, if it's important backup all you can.

I've got priceless memories in my Google photos library but ofc Google removed being able to view them on my native photos app and download easily.. so instead I either have to backup and save ALL of it in Google drive or download specific albums.. idk so I wouldn't personally recommend google as a true backup as you never know, personally I'd just use DVDs and flash drives for that stuff

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I do exactly the same. I do not have a lot of data I feel a need to backup. I have a nightly job that zips and then encrypts my data, then rclones it to off site storage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Everything to Crashplan.

Critical data also goes to Tarsnap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I backup my ESXi VMs and NAS file shares to local server storage using an encrypted Veeam job and have a copy job to a local NAS with iSCSI storage presented.

From there I have another host VM accessing that same iSCSI share uploading the encrypted backup to Backblaze. Unlimited "local" storage for $70\y? Yes please! (iSCSI appears local to Backblaze. They know and have already started they don't care.)

I'm backing up about 4TB to them currently using this method.

[–] jubilationtcornpone 2 points 10 months ago

Mine is kind of similar. Hyper-V backed up with Veeam to a separate logical disk (same RAID array, different HDD's). Veeam backups are replicated to iDrive with rsync.

I need to readjust my replication schedule to prioritize the critical backups because my upload speed isn't fast enough to do a full replication that often.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Various HDD full data backups maintained with FreeFileSync, important files backup on ProtonDrive. Multi-device autosync with Syncthing (phones, tablet, pcs)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Docker cp piped into restic, uploading to wasabi. Works well, I recently recovered from a hard drive failure and everything just worked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I've finally settled on Duplicacy. I've tried several CLI tools, messed with and love rclone, tried the other GUI backup tools, circled back to Duplicacy.

I run a weekly app data backup of my unRAID docker containers, which is stored on an external SSD attacked via USB to the server. The day after that runs duplicacy does a backup of that folder to Backblaze B2. My Immich library is backed up nightly and also sent to B2 via Duplicacy. Currently, those are the only bits of critical data on the server. I will add more as I finalize a client backup for the Win10, Linux, and MacOS devices at home, but it will follow this trend.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I do an s3 sync every five minutes of my important files to a versioned bucket in AWS, with S3-IA and glacier instant retrieval policies, depending on directory. This also doubles as my Dropbox replacement, and I use S3 explorer to view/sync from my phone.

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