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?
Prayer
You don’t have to worry about the backups. It the data recovery that will require divine intervention.
Jesus is my
copilotraid parity.
Raid is backup right?
of course /s
It protects against drive failure. That is the threat I am most worried about, so it’s fine for me.
drive failure
Perhaps unintended but very much relevant singular. Unless you’re doing RAID 6 or the like, a simultaneous failure of two drives still means data loss. It’s also worth noting that drives of the same model and batch tend to fail after similar amounts of time.
Oh, don’t worry they’re a random mix of old drives I had lying around, they’re most certainly not the same model, let alone batch!
(But yes, fair call if you have a big Nas. I have 2TB in my desktop)
That’s the thing. I don’t.
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?
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.
At home and at the shop where I work. At work the drives are actually stored in a Faraday cage.
Either works, if you dont trust them encryption is always an option
Tape is the best medium for archiving data.
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 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.
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Manually plug in a few disks every once in a while and copy the important stuff. Disks are offline for the most part.
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what’s the pricing like? looking at my own use case a full backup to b2 would cost me almost 100 bucks a month if I understand the pricing correctly. Given the tendency of my data storage it seems cheaper to me to just buy more hdds and store them in a safe at my bank
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Wait, Proxmox Backup Server runs on ARM?
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Backblaze. Automated with Velero in kubernetes.
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
I wrote my own thing. I didn’t understand how the standard options worked so I gave up.
I use Kopia
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.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.
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.