Someone on Lemmy posted a phrase recently: “If you’re not prepared to manage backups then you’re not prepared to self host.”
This seems like not only sound advice but a crucial attitude. My backup plans have been fairly sporadic as I’ve been entering into the world of self hosting. I’m now at a point where I have enough useful software and content that losing my hard drive would be a serious bummer. All of my most valuable content is backed up in one way or another, but it’s time for me to get serious.
I’m currently running an Ubuntu Server with a number of Docker containers, and lots of audio, video, and documents. I’d like to be able to back up everything to a reliable cloud service. I currently have a subscription to proton drive, which is a nice padding to have, but which I knew from the start would not be really adequate. Especially since there is no native Linux proton drive capability.
I’ve read good things about iDrive, S3, and Backblaze. Which one do you use? Would you recommend it? What makes your short list? what is the best value?
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I use 2 matching Synology NAS systems. 1 backs up to the other daily. Then one of them backs up to Synology C2 weekly.
I’m a long time user of jottacloud. It’s not really meant for 10TB+, but works great for what I need it to do.
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 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 like S3 because I only pay for what I use and it has auto storage tiering.
I use Storj, it’s been my favorite for years.
Do you mine? Always sounded like the best option if you dont have a friend in another georegion to replicate-to
I did for a few years when the network started, but it became increasingly difficult to do so from a residential IP with slow upload speeds (cable internet).
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.
One of few ransomware protected solutions
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.
Restic (or rustic) and Hetzner storage box 🤩
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!
I like that I can interface with it in ways that I already understand (eg rclone, sync, sshfs).
Being able to run some commands on the server meant that I could use rclone to copy my AWS and OneDrive backups directly cloud-to-cloud.
They require you to buy a minimum of 800Gb, which for most people is an overkill
Is it? I’m genuinely asking. I haven’t seen statistics on how much storage people looking for cloud backup solutions use, but to me, anything under 1TB seems too small to be worth it, these days.
@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.
Local storage + a Veeam VBR VM
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.
I use restic to backblaze b2.
Yep, Duplicacy to Backblaze B2 for me
Same
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.
