I've been backing up to a dedicated hard disk within the same server for all my backups in case my disks fail. And as I run more and more services, the concern of disks failures grow bigger.
I'm looking for a cheapish off-site backup solution and I'm just curious what everyone does for their 3-2-1 backup solutions.
Honestly, I don't. The vast majority of my data is just stuff like Linux ISOs that I could download again. Important documents and stuff like that take up so little space that I just keep them in Google Drive. Most of my personal project work is on GitHub. And while neither of those are technically backups, it's not a tragic loss if I accidentally delete everything.
Yeah it's weird, 10+ years ago or so I feel like I had SO MUCH DATA and it was always an issue. Now I really don't have anything. A few gigs of photos I guess, some various files, but that's it. I guess I used to have a lot more media like movies and porn, which I don't really need anymore.
Do you have any family or friends that are willing to let a small NAS sit around somewhere? Or host a friends backup and return they host your backup? For me, this approach works well and is probably as cheap as it can get.
To just backup some data over the internet, any cheap old NAS will do. I have an old NAS sitting at my parents and just manually turn it on when I'm visiting. A small startup script runs rsync without further interaction and shuts down when finished.
I used to use Backblaze B2, until I did the maths on how much it would cost me to restore. B2 storage is cheap yes, but the egress is so fucking expensive. It would have cost me hundreds.
Wasabi storage is equally cheap, and restoring won't cost me an arm and a leg.
you store less than 1TB (they charge for a minimum of 1TB even if you store nothing)
you pay for any data you upload for 90 days minimum.. so if you upload 500GB and then delete it within 90 days, you're paying for it for the duration anyway..
You can only download the same amount as you store in a month without incurring egress costs.
The 3 points above are how they can not charge egress for the majority of people.
wasabi is cheaper than B2 unless…
you store less than 1TB
Yeah, absolutely. In my case, I backup way more than 1TB.
you pay for any data you upload for 90 days minimum
Which is absolutely acceptable in a offsite backup scenario. The data there is present for a long time, and if you use a solution like Restic which has deduplication capabilities, this is not an issue.
You can only download the same amount as you store in a month without incurring egress costs.
This is false. You can only download the same amount as you store in a month without violating the terms of service. That said, I've been using Wasabi in a professional manner for a number of years now, and as long as it isn't a regular occurrence, you can always contact support and give them a heads up that you do need to have more egress in a month.
This only occurs if you have to do a full restore TWICE in a month, which I had to once due to our team not noticing that the SAS controlled had failed and was responsible for corrupting data; not the drives. Support was quick, and it was no issue. Still didn't pay for that egress.
Backblaze will ship you a drive up to 8TB with your restore data on it. You pay a $189 fee which includes shipping and handling and serves as a deposit to guarantee the drive while it’s in your hands. They refund the deposit when they get the drive back. Or you can keep the drive if you like.
Ah yes automated backups, on my to-do which I'll hopefully do before a failure (famous last words).
People talking about backblaze b2. I just looked. Why not use the personal one? The one computer would just be the Nas if using it for cold storage/redundancy?
HTWingNut:
Backblaze Personal only works with Windows PC's and Mac, and drives that are physically connected to the computer. No VM's, no network drives/hardlinks/symlinks, etc. You have to use their software to backup too. As someone else noted, for recovery you can grab files in 500GB chunks as a zip, or 8TB drive mailed to you (free of charge up to 5 per year). Data needs to be retained on your local drives otherwise it will delete them from their servers after 30 days unless you upgrade to their 1 year retention plan.
I have a Windows PC that is on 24/7 for a number of things, and I just put a hard drive in there that I backup my most important NAS files to that, and it gets backed up to Backblaze Personal.
Backblaze Personal is cheap and I see the appeal, but you have to understand and live with those caveats for "unlimited" backup.
I use B2 with rclone and just backup "important" stuff on my NAS with cron jobs. I guess you could have rclone move the "important" stuff from NAS to a "burner" PC which uses Backblaze Personal.
I don't have enough data to warrant all that so I use B2 for now and I have around 50GB of data so the price is cheap
I'm currently backing up my 20TB Hetzner Storage box using a windows VM to Backblaze Personal backup. I'm using https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany to mount the SMB share as a "real" local drive.
My home "offsite" backup is a second NAS at my parents house. I plan on getting two identical NASes with identical storage setup and let them replicate themselves automatically, but no money for that now.
I just switched to Kopia and B2 a few months back and it is working great so far. I backup my machines with Kopia to a local Unraid box on my network running Kopia server. Then the Kopia repo on the Unraid box is synced up to Backblaze B2 nightly.
I'm only backing up around 200 GB of data so the B2 storage is something like $1 a month.
2 spare drives and a safe deposit box ($10/yr). Swap the bank box once a month or so. My upstream bandwidth isn't enough to make cloud saves practical, and if anything happens, retrieving the drive is faster than shipping a replacement, nevermind restoring from cloud.
Of course, my system is a few TB, not a few dozen.
Define which data is from value. I got 68TB of data but realistically only 3 TB are from such value I maintain several copies (Raspi + SSD) and online backup. The rest of data is stored on a cheap server built at a family member and synchronized twice a year. Make sure your systems and drives are all encrypted. And test your backups and redeployment strategy.
I have a 2 x 8TB in RAID1 NAS at a family members house and I also have an OVH dedicated server with 2 x 480GB in RAID1 and 2 x 8TB in RAID1. I use rclone for my backups and keep deleted files for 30 days on the NAS and 120 days on the OVH dedicated server. Both the NAS and server connect back to my home network using WireGuard.
The OVH dedicated server also runs numerous virtual machines that host websites as well as backups of my netbox and mediawiki instance I run at home(they sync nightly).
If you ever get raided by the Feds they'll probably raid your friends and family's houses too so it is generally advisable to avoid using friends and family for offsite storage.
First they'd need a reason which they won't find or have.
Secondly in my 20+ years working in IT and using the internet I've never once heard that statement about it being "generally advisable to avoid using friends and family for offsite storage". Needed a good laugh. Thanks.
I have a borg server in the office that takes backups of all my servers. Each server stores their applications backup that gets pulled into the repo. On top of that, the borg server pushes the backup to rsync.net.
I use restic/borg (depending on servers) and push to a bunch of S3 buckets on Backblaze.
This applies to my desktop, my NAS and in general my non-Kubernetes data.
For Kubernetes I wrote a small tool that...well does the same for PVCs. Packs up the data with restic (soon I hope to migrate to rustic, once the library gets polished) and pushes to Backblaze.
To give an idea of the pricing, for 730GB, with daily backups or more, I pay approximately $5 a month.
Restic is fantastic. It's just one binary, has support for various cloud services (including Backblaze which I use as well), snapshots which can be mounted with FUSE. It's really quite useful. Borg I believe is similar?
Either way, I feel like today there is no reason to use awkward rsync solutions when better tools are out that have proven themselves.
Yeah, borg is very very similar, at least in the context I use it! I agree with the praise of restic, very solid tool. It's always possible to use rsync...but to sync restic repos!
I use syncthing to synchronise my collection of important stuff between my laptop, local server and VPS. My laptop then gets backed-up to an USB SSD using Time Machine. Granted, it’s not a proper backup, but it’s better than nothing.
For my photo collection I burned it to a BluRay (M-disc) and asked my SO to store it at work.
I won't go into my solution here, but the only tip I'll give you is don't use cloud based storage. Restoring is slow if we're talking terrabytes, it's expensive compared to buying a disk and your data is never truly safe.
Buy another drive, backup to it and have it on a rotation schedule. I keep my "offsite" backup in the boot of my car. If I'm not at home I'm usually away with my car.
Storing a hard disk in a car or any other moving vehicle is highly not recommended. The vibration will kill your drive. There are stories of companies moving drives on trolleys across their carpark to find the data has been lost.
Everything local is synced to NAS.
NAS is backed up to external USB-HDD with versioning (Hyperbackup).
NAS is backed up to Hetzner Storage via Kopia with versioned Snapshots off-site.
Crashplan can't tell the difference between local folders and NFS mounts, and they have an unlimited size backup plan per device for like $10/month. I have 1 device with NFS mounts from many desktops and my Nas. About 9TB.
Are you saying, theoretically if I had 100s of TB (I don't... yet!) on mounted drives (local or NFS shares), I could back it all up to Crashplan, and keep the retention as long as the files still exist on my device(s)?
Sounds amazing, but what's the cost of restoring the data? They're not being very loud about that part on their website.
Yes. Look here, the plan is per-device, and the capacity is unlimited: https://www.crashplan.com/pricing/ . I think the restore would be extremely painful, it's not a fast pipe, but the bigger you go that's gonna be an issue no matter what.
i use duplicati to back up configs and data for docker containers to 2 cloud services. my 8 TB server is almost maxed. i need funds to buy a backup for that and expand.
I know synology (and others probably) have an app where you can back up your data to your friends NAS and vice versa, but that's taking up their storage too and cost for HDD/SSD may be prohibitive
I use Borg + borgmatic (although I may be a little biased there...) and backup to BorgBase and rsync.net. When figuring out where your "cheapish" off-site backup solution should be, you need to take into account: How much data you want to store, how much you expect it to be deduplicated, how much you expect it to grow, and your needs for retrieval and egress. See some of the other comments here on some of the pros/cons of various providers.
Also, it should be said that Borg doesn't directly support non-SSH cloud storage providers, although you could always backup with Borg locally and then rclone that to a cloud provider. Restic does support non-SSH cloud storage directly, but then no borgmatic. So, 🤷.
I run a Synology NAS and use their backup solution Synology C2. It's e2e encrypted, pretty affordable and well integrated into the system, so it was basically a one-click setup. Also, they keep old versions for 30 days, but only the most recent versions count towards your quota, which makes the space usage very predictable.
You can get a 1TB storage box at hetzner.com for €3.81 per month. For about €13 you get 5TB. I was on S3 first and moved to the 1TB box because it's significantly cheaper.
Hetzner storage box, and just rsync. It takes care of snapshotting via auto snapshots. I costs like $20 for 1T I think. But there are cheaper options yoo
follow up - i never considered offsite backups for my data. i have a ds920+ that's got some big drives in it and thats all i need. but after reading this post i considered backup. what i went with was a qnap ts233, a wifi adapter, and 2 6t's that i had replaced with bigger ones on my syno. My syno is my daily driver and the new qnap sits on my work desk at the office, syncs with the syno, and backs up my photos and docs. Happy with this back up method. Thanks for the great post.
I've got a Tarsnap account backing up my especially important data every night, which is admittedly only a couple of gigabytes of scans of important documents, hard to replace files, etc. It's doing snapshot-style backup with a backup for every day in the last week, every week of the last month, every month of the last year, and the last three years. Paying less than a dollar a month for it, so it's working out.
That stuff also gets rsync'd each night onto my NAS, which has its own automated LVM snapshot system going on along the same lines, and I'm using syncthing to mirror it onto my other PCs as a final last-ditch backup (and in case I need it elsewhere). Finally, there's an external hard drive I keep manual backups on every once in a while.
Larger datasets that aren't really stuff I want to pay for on the cloud (14 TB worth) just get stored on the NAS and a drawer full of external hard drives. Not ideal, but it's just way too much data.
I run a Windows 10 vm that shares a drive with samba, I borg/kopia backup everything to it, and it runs the backblaze client which then backs up to Backblaze personal backup.
Out of laziness yeah, but it could probably pretty easily be set up to turn it off and on when needed, since you can schedule when the Backblaze backs up.
NAS restic repo is stored online on a dedicated internal drive, which is mirrored to an external drive (normally kept offline in a safe when not bein synced), and offsite is a 3rd copy to Backblaze B2 using rclone.
Used to use freefilesync for offsite backups, but haven't in a while. Wanted to replace that with a native BTRFS offsite sync tool like Btrbk, but haven't got around to it yet
My personal approach to offsite is to have my NAS, running TrueNAS Core, automatically encrypt and back up its primary pool directly to an S3-compatible service called Wasabi.
I've also considered setting up a small box with a 12TB hard drive at my parents' house a few miles away for ZFS replication.
My server is now up to 100 and something tb of storage. About 50% used. Raid 6. (Yes raid isn’t a backup. I know)
Mainly media. Movies, tv, music, Books/audiobooks.
I’ve separated our media storage vs OS.
I only backup my OS and configs. It goes to an on-site nas.
If my media library dies, I’ll just slowly re-download what people want.
If I lose my os, I have one backup, other wise I’m off to work rebuilding that too.
I’m happy to pay for iCloud at this stage to backup and store sentimental or critical things.