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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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.
Yup I’ve got a box in my mum’s house that all my off site backups go to and it’s a damn site cheaper just to give her some money for the electricity cost of it each month than pay for any cloud service.
Or simply sneakernet drives to a friend’s home. Good excuse to visit a friend more often.
This is the way
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.
I use restic to backblaze b2.
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.
Tape/glue the Pi in the case to the HDD.
Done.
I’m getting this set up at my parents’. Just gotta remind them not to touch the box!
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 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.
Restoring data is free from backblaze.
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 do that multiple times?
There aren’t any “gotchas” they absolutely lose money us who store more than a few TB but its worth it considering that we are in the minority.
Someone from BB posted a graph showing the distribution of data usage over all users and the VAST majority are under 1-2 TB
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.
My backup plan includes Backrest (restic) up to B2. So far so good!
Restic (or rustic) and Hetzner storage box 🤩
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’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.
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’m on Pcloud, server with rsync+rclone to move files from file system to cloud and use it as a unified file system.
The lifetime storage offer from pcloud has been worth it for me and I even upgraded it from 2 to 12 TB
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.
Nobody that uses Wasabi?
I also restic to b2. Found it the best value.
