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?
If you’re talking multiple Terrabytes and are located in the EU you might want to consider AWS Glacier I have like 6Tb on there and pay sub 20€ p.m. If you’re in the EU you can request one free migration download by contacting the support. Otherwise you’ll pay thousands.
I keep all my data local on hard drives, and then use Backblaze personal backup
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.
Restic (or rustic) and Hetzner storage box 🤩
I like S3 because I only pay for what I use and it has auto storage tiering.
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.
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.
Nobody that uses Wasabi?
Too expensive
When I’ve signed up was the cheaper. I’ve just checked and it’s $6.99/TB/month and Backblaze B2 is actually cheaper ($6/TB/month). Are there other differences that you know of? There must be since everyone is using Baclblaze.
I prefer my local storage. Can’t vouch for any cloud storage.
Upside of Wasabi to my infrastructure: It’s compatible with Veeam.
Local storage + a Veeam VBR VM
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.
Is that not against their TOS? Could make the service more expensive for the rest of us
I’m not sure about the iscsi protocol. They allow VMs, including harddrives via USB, so the point of doing this making it more expensive does not apply considering someone could just hook up 100tb+ of USB drives and still be clear under the TOS.
If they did have a problem with this I would just do that instead.
Bsckblaze doesn’t care, they know they’ll get their money when @Unforeseen@sh.itjust.works tries to get data back from backup.
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Well yes and no. The rate at which you get your data back is where the gotcha lies anything up to 8TB is free if you send them $280 and they’ll refund the money once they get the drive back. Anything over 8TB is where it gets pricey.
And the situation where I need to restore more then 8tb would be when I lost all my original data, and the backup NAS itself.
If that happens I’m not worrying about spending $280.
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I use restic to backblaze b2.
Yep, Duplicacy to Backblaze B2 for me
Same
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.
Yeah, it was $2.5/tb/month, now it’s $4.1/tb/month.
Still cheaper than backblaze’s $6 which seems the only other option everyone suggests, so it’ll have to do for the moment.My idrive plan went from just over $100 to $250.
I created another account, paid for another year at a promotional price, and then deleted my old account.
I will eventually have to come up with a more sustainable cloud/off site backup now that i need more than just a few TB.
Since this is really my “last resort” backup, I’m not too concerned, as anything that would require me to actually restore from this backup set would likely be catastrophic in a life-ending way.
This is actually one of my New Year’s resolutions lol. Right now, my backups are local and my offsites are a hodgepodge of cloud services (basically holding encrypted container blobs of my stuff). Not ideal.
I’m looking at signing up for rsync.net since a lot of my backups are done via rsync anyway. Plan is to keep my local backups as-is and rsync them to rsync.net.
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.
I’m getting this set up at my parents’. Just gotta remind them not to touch the box!
For inspiration, take a look at the Nextcloud Devices - just for the hardware ideas.
I’m still running a Nextcloud Box (with the original Western Digital drive) and it’s fine for my needs.
Tape/glue the Pi in the case to the HDD.
Done.
I’ve thought about gutting an old toaster, like for toasting bread, to house a raspberry pi and instead of slices of bread you can stick harddrives into the slots. Two bays. The prime motivation is just to be able to say that I can run Linux on a toaster. Next step would be running Linux on a dead badger I guess.
Yes but can you run Doom on a dead badger
I would hope someone has made a toaster drive dock by now, missed opportunity
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.