3 sticky notes telling me to "go get that incremental backup working",
2 separate external hard drives,
1 month out of date

"3! 2! 1!" Is just what I say when doing some potentially deleterious action after rsyncing a few key directories to a separate volume

I dump my encrypted data to someone who probably practices 3-2-1 rule (which is Backblaze for me). I mean, these guys back up data for a living.

A usb stick and an old hard drive from 2009. The crackhead way of dealing with backups.

• Primary ZFS pool with automatic snapshots
  • Provides 3+ copies of the files via snapshots (3)
• Secondary ZFS pool at a different location replicates the primary
  • Provides more copies of the files (3)
  • Provides second media (2)
  • Is off-site (1)

Does this make sense?

my backup is staring longingly at LTO drives and wishing they would magically be affordable.

DO NOT follow my lead, my backup solution is scuffed at best.

3:

I have:

• RAID1 array w/ 2 drives
• Photos on the device that took them
• Photos on a random old hard drive pulled from an ancient apple mac.

2:

I've got a hard drive and flash memory?

1:

Don't have this at all, the closest is that my phone is off-site half of the day.

I use Proxmox Backup Server for my backups. Everything backups to 1 system at home. I then sync the data store to a little NAS I have at a family members house across town and also to a cheap storage VPS on the other side of the country. I also do a manual sync of the data store to a single external drive that I manually connect and disconnect.

None of my data hoarding files are backed up as that would cost way too much. That could change if I ever find a killer deal on an LTO8 or better drive and tapes.

I know that Hetzner has some decently priced Storage Boxes that you can mount using rclone and then backup to. Keep in mind that latency will be a factor so it could be slow.

My current plan once new migration is completed:

Primary pool - 1x ZFS (couldn't afford redundancy but no different to my RPI server). My goal is to get a few more drives and set up a RAIDZ1/2.

Weekly backup of critical data (eg. nextcloud) from primary pool to a secondary pool. Goal here is to get a mirror but will only be one drive for now.

Weekly upload of secondary pool to hetzner storage box via rsync.

Current server

1x backup to secondary drive (rpi) 1x backup to hetzner storage box via rsync

I rawdog storage. I RAID0 and forget. huehue.

1 backup on a local, Independence disk. 1 backup on a HDD connected to an OpenWRT router at the other end of the house 1 backup on my remote vps.

Restic+backrest

Sftp for remote endpoint

4-2-1-1 for me I guess 🫣 or 4-2-2?

Two copies at home, synced daily, one of them in an external drive that I like to refer as the emergency grab and run copy lol

One at a family member synced weekly and manually every time I visit.

All of those three copies are always within a 10 kilometer radius in a valley overseen by a volcano so..

One partial copy of the so-critical-would-cry-if-Iost data is synced every few days to a backblaze bucket.

All persistent storage from my dockers are in a folder. All I have to backup everything is backup this one folder along with my docker compose files (in git).

Locally there are zfs snapshots (autosnapshot) and for remote I use borgmatic.

Borg to :

1. Local server
2. Friends server
3. Borgbase

All storage is on a Ceph cluster with 2 or 3 disk/node replication. Files and databases are backed up using Velero and Barman to S3-compatible storage on the same cluster for versioning. Every night, those S3 buckets are synced and encrypted using rclone to a 10tb Hetzner Storage Box that keeps weekly snapshots.

Config files in my git repo:

https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/external_applications/velero-helm.yaml

https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/custom_applications/bitwarden/database.yaml

https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/custom_applications/backups

https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/custom_applications/rook-ceph

Bit more than 3 copies, but hdd storage is cheap. Majority of my storage is Jellyfin anyways, which doesn't get backed up.

I'm working on setting up some small nvme nodes for the ceph cluster, which will allow me to move my nextcloud from hdd storage into its own S3 bucket with 4+2 erasure coding (aka raid 6). That will make it much faster and also its cut raw storage usage from 4x to 1.5x usable capacity

I've a nightly cronjob that runs backup using rsync for my local, and an external HDD that I stash in my work locker that I bring home once a week or so to connect to the server, run a backup script (more rsync), then take it back to work. It's not super sophisticated, but it works, and I have tested and restored from both the local and offsite backups.

My one other media type is “the cloud”.

I use hard drives, I can’t imagine trying to put something on a disk or something.

One thing I do recommend, I keep one unencrypted hard drive copy in the safest most hidden part of my house. This is in case encryption software disappears, or I just forget my encryption keys or something.

Other than that, one encrypted copy of files in a thumb drive in my wallet (selected files, not everything). One in my car. One in my firesafe. Then daily cloud backup.

Wow, a lot of variation in this thread!

I get all my data to my server, then from there I have borgmatic do incremental backups to a backup drive on the same machine (nightly cronjob).

From there I use Rclone to get the encrypted borg backup to Backblaze B2 for cloud storage.

So for 3 2 1, my 3 copies are the original, the local backup, and the cloud backup.

My 2 media are local hard drives and cloud storage (I think it's fair to consider this a different kind of media).

And my 1 offsite is the cloud backup.

Now I'm dumb and have a fear of screwing something up so I have also started burning M-Discs of my critical data (everything except TV/movie/music stuff I can redownload). Though this was a lot more expensive than I was expecting, because of aforementioned me being dumb I already screwed up two discs (they are write once). I'm also doing two copies of each disc.

Also I have photos/home videos additionally stored in ente, they are super important to me and I wanted a separated copy someone else is looking after.

I use Backblaze B2 for one offsite backup in "the cloud" and have two local HDDs. Using restic with rclone as storage interface, the whole thing is pretty easy.

A cronjob makes daily backups to B2, and once per month I copy the most current snapshot from B2 to my two local HDDs.

I have one planned improvement: Since my server needs programmatic access to B2, malware on it could wipe both the server and B2, leaving me with the potentially one-month old local backups. Therefore I want to run a Raspberry Pi at my parents' place that mirrors the B2 repository daily but is basically air-gapped from the server. Should the B2 repository be wiped, the Raspberry Pi would still retain its snapshots.

My nas is a second copy of all my data, nothing only exists on the nas. The nas is also is slowly uploading to backblaze, data limits are slowing my progress. My photos which I feel are the least replaceable are automatically backed up to my nas , Google photos, and amazon photos, with manual backup to my desktop, and manual backup to an external hard drive that is stored in a fire resistant box.

My main server is backed up via Kopia to a 5 TB Hetzner Storage Box and to a second server at my parents in law‘s place. I‘ve got additional MDisc backups of old photos, Paperless PDFs and work related files that don‘t change at my mother‘s place as well.

My Linux ISO collection is too big to actually back up. So, I regularly create file lists and in the event of data loss, I will have to spend quite some time to rebuild it. At least, my fiber connection will help me with that.

1. User devices (main workstations, phone photos, etc)
2. Local NAS (sync w/ #1, backup to #3)
3. Cloud backup w/ commercial provider

NAS (42tb RAID5), 2x 18tb spinning drives, 5tb SSD as daily driver, proton drive for critical stuff (2tb).

Not exactly 3-2-1 but it covers the same roughly

All my video media that's easier to replace than preserve is on my NAS running openmediavault with mergerfs. If I lose a drive I can always just, you know, torrent the tv show again.

My main PC (everything except the Steam game install directory) is backed up through KopiaUI to a folder on that mergerfs array that contains media that's difficult/impossible to replace. Daily incremental backups.

That folder is mounted on my PC through DOKAN, which tells Windows OS that it's a local resource (it does this more thoroughly than just assigning a drive letter to a NAS folder through Windows' built-in system). The PC, including the "sensitive NAS media" folder, is then backed up to Backblaze's personal backup service ($99/yr, unlimited size with one-year versioning). The DOKAN step is required for this, since Backblaze doesn't support mounted NAS drives or non-Windows systems (presumably they don't want to use space on versioned encrypted backups of hundred-terabyte pirate movie collections).

Oh, and my phone does one-way Syncthing to my PC, thus putting its files on the PC for Kopia and Backblaze to do their thing.

I use immich and nextcloud for the clients (my wife and my parents know that I only take care about that data) and on the server side I use borgmatic which has a local repository on the second drive inside my nuc and a remote repository hosted by hetzner called "storage box" which supports borg native.

Yes the remote is out of my physical access, but borg is fully encrypted and for 4$/3.6€/month for 1TB I feel good.

Before I started with borg and hetzner I had a rsync based backup with an odroid hc1 hosted by my parents, but that doesn't feel safe. Due to slow network by my parents I had to sync my local backup instead of a second backup from the real data and the monitoring was also very bad.

From my point of view: You have no backup, if it is not automated and you have no monitoring.

Sometimes: a laughing hyena.

If you don't have tested backups, you don't have a backup.

I use Kopia to B2, then on a monthly basis I copy the current Kopia repo to an external drive that's otherwise kept offline in my house.

Currently only have pictures and documents stored, so everything easily fits on 1tb. One copy on my homeserver (unencrypted), one copy on my laptop (Luks encrypted), and one copy with rsync and a raspi at my parents (unencrypted). Might change encryption strategies to all luks.

2x 2TB with rsync

2X 500GB with rsync.

1x 1TB cloud drive via rsync

The 2TB has a 500GB dir that gets cloned to the other 2 500GB drives and the cloud.

4 drives, 2 locations (1 offsite)

I could spare 500gb portion somewhere I guess but it's just easy atm that the important 500GB gets copied around 1x a week.

Daily backup to Backblaze B2, and weekly backups to hard drives

3: RAID-1 pair + manual periodic sync to an external HD, roughly monthly. Databases synced to cloud.

2: external HD is unplugged when not syncing

1: External HD is a rotating pair, swapped in a bank box, roughly quarterly. Bank box costs $45/year.

If the RAID crashes, I lose at most a month. If the house burns down, I lose at most 3 months. Ransomware, unless it's really stealthy, I lose 3 months. If I had ongoing development projects, a month (or 3) would be a lot to lose, and I'd probably switch to weekly syncs and monthly swaps, but for what I actually do - media files, financial and smart-home data, 3 months would not be impossible to recreate.

All of this works because my system is small enough to fit on one HDD. A 3-2-1 system for tens of TB starts to look a lot like an enterprise system.

My day-to-day stuff stays in sync via syncthing on my two laptops, my desktop and my home server. They all run btrfs, so I won't be syncing any flipped bits around.

Home server rsyncs from my VPS once a week. When that's fine, it rsyncs itself over to a hetzner storage over sshfs+gocryptfs.

Four copies at home, one in the cloud.

• Daily incremental (and occasionally full) backup to an external HDD - a full image of my PCs, so that I should be able to restore anything back to what it was in the last ~14 days, assuming no ransomware or fire or...
• All the data I care about gets synced to my Nextcloud (VPS, not home lab) - somewhat ransomware protected as I could restore VPS backups independently from my PC.
• Most precious data (mostly photos) gets backed up regularly to an encrypted zip file and then gets send to a glacier tier S3 bucket. Some manual retention is done on the zip file level, so that I can get a tad older backup restored.
• At least monthly a full backup image of my PCs is created on a separate external HDD which is not stored at home, but in a place I could access 24/7 if I really needed to restore something fast.

Phones, etc? Just sync to the mentioned Nextcloud, PC downloads from there and everything gets then into the aforementioned backups.

Homeserver? See "PC" above. With the caveat that some VMs/containers are not in the backup cycle, as they do not store any valuable data besides temp files, etc. For these, only things like docker compose files, custom config, ansible playbooks,... are in my backup.

3 backups:

• phone data is synced to a nvme drive (1) which holds all the data of my homelab
• This nvme is backed up to a nvme (2) drive on the same device via backrest
• The nvme is also synced via Diplicati to a cloud storage provider (3)

2 locations: home and cloud

1... what was 1 again?

Everything backs up to a Synology diskstation (with disk redundancy). The Syno's Hyperbackup makes backups of critical stuff stuff to the cloud weekly. In the case of my self-hosted stuff, it's mostly the share storage where all my docker volumes map to. Also workstation backsups, home assistant backups, phone photos, etc.

A back up of the temporally replaceable stuff (everything not covered above) which is hosted from the Diskstation, is made to an external drive a few times a year and stored off-site the rest of the time. This isn't 3-2-1, but its close enough for my needs.

All my systems are backed up with "rsnapshot" to a file server. File server is backed up to backblaze with duplicacy.

iDrive e2 with duplicati and manually to an external SSD with rscyn every so often.

I was planing on asking a friend to setup a server at their home, but I feel somewhat comfortable with the current solution.