Is there any good decentralized cloud storage for personal backups as a self-hoster?

decentralized cloud storage

isnt that kind of an oxymoron?

Torrents kind of are that.
- personal backups over torrent? and who would download that?
No. Why do you think it is?
- "Cloud" infers centralized consolidation of resources in a datacenter. A PaaS, for example.
  
  "Decentralized" infers any number of running instances of something that are not tied to any specific vendor, infrastructure, or location.
  
  Cloud can be distributed, but not decentralized since the underlying controls of the infrastructure are themselves centralized.
I meant that 'cloud' refers to systems accessed over the Internet, not necessarily centralized, but I also associate the term with centralized stuff so I'm not totally sure.

Not sure this is what you are looking for, but syncthing is for self-hosting and it's Peer-2-Peer. I use it to synchronize my important documents and photos across my devices, it has options for encryption and file versioning.

Syncthing is the 3 in my 3-2-1 backup strategy. It enables me to maintain 3 copies of my files: desktop, phone, NAS

"personal" and "trustless" seem sort of at odds here. you want personal data, so you want personal storage.

what I recommend, if you have the time and energy, is to find another self-hoster you trust and be "backup buddies" with them. set up remote file storage on both your networks and send your backups to the other person's server.

if you can't find another self-hoster, then find a friend or family member you trust and mail them your backups on a physical disk.

Don't forget to encrypt your backups before sending them, just in case... Better be safe than sorry
- Problem is you need a way to decrypt that shit with memory loss and a burned down house.

I recently started a "backup ring" with my buddies who have their own servers too. It's just folders synced over sync thing, each has their own folder, and we put stuff there that we want to access even in case everything I own burns out. Works pretty well so far.

Don't use storj. I used to recommend them, but they have instituted a $5 minimum charge to have an account. The tl;dr is that they are interested in B2B, not individuals.

I've moved over to Tigris.

Announcement: https://forum.storj.io/t/new-minimum-usage-fee-starting-july-1/30057/1

Here's a follow up to the drama: https://forum.storj.io/t/a-follow-up-on-the-new-minimum-usage-fee-and-a-request-for-feedback/30089

Hit up the /r/storj for more drama if you dare to look at Reddit again :puke:

Oh, that's disappointing. I was thinking of eventually using Storj as a second s3 endpoint for backups in addition to Backblaze.
Why did you choose Tigris over the cheaper B2?
- I'm doing the archive tier which is cheaper than B2

You could check out IPFS, the OG.

Wouldn't be a good solution, you're hoping that other users are going to volunteer to pin (aka store and seed) your personal backup data for you.

Using IPFS for personal backups is exactly the same as creating a torrent with your backup data - With both it would be unlikely that your personal backup data will actually exist anywhere beyond your own data storage, no one's going to freely volunteer to store your backups for you.
- Sure, but you don't necessarily have to use it like that, you can provide your own decentralized storage using it. Put some cheap devices (old RPis w/ large SD cards) at friends'/family members' houses and have them pin your most important stuff. If they get broken/lost, NBD, you probably have another copy somewhere else.
  
  If a lot of your data isn't critical and you're willing to gamble a bit (e.g. movies or something you can re-rip), then IPFS could be a perfect fit, just like torrents are (though IPFS probably isn't great for large media like movies, but hopefully my point makes sense).
  
  I'm not saying it's perfect or anything, just that it exists and is in this domain. A lot of similar projects compare themselves to IPFS, so understanding what it is and isn't is useful what evaluating alternatives.

If you set up something like Garage with borg with a bunch of other people you could create a network where you essentially swap hard drive space to ensure you’re all backed up.

But I think Garage assumes very high trust with your fellow hosts, so this doesn’t scale beyond direct social connections.

Got a link for that? Searching for "garage backup storage" doesn't really get me anywhere...
- https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

Siacoin.

Thanks for your advice! I'm interested in trying Siacoin. Was it expensive?
- You can see the current median price here: https://siascan.com/
  
  The storage providers set their own prices and the renters set how much they want to pay.
  
  Just storing data is very cheap at $1.51/TB.
I really wanted sia to take off. I wouldn't trust it yet though.
- I have used it before and it worked just fine. Just don’t use it for PeerTube 😅

I don't know, but allow me a soft rant about the 'distributed' part;

Couldn't selfhosters try to 'organize' and share these burdens ? Why pay for external cloud backup, or anything, when selfhosters can just help each other storing parts of others backup. Then everyone have an automatic back-up.

The tools seem to be there, but Its like there are all these super-skilled infra-structure selfhosters that know everything about self-hosting solutions, but they lack the self-organizing ability to sollve these typical - and a bit trivial, lets be honest - problems in a full p2p style. The result looks to be that all self-hostings solution above the threshold of an average individual selhoster, have to be done in the cloud, and everyone is 'siloed' in their own mini data center.

But, with existing tools, AI and a little imagination, it shouldn't be too hard to 'organize' a little (though here) design a self-hosting p2p backup solution from existing tools. ..or a solution for most of the other cloud services we still rely on..

But maybe its something else ? ..to me, it just seems unnecessary for a high expertise self-hoster community that - when combined - are an absolute gargantuan cloud-service infrastructure ..to still have such basic capacity issues (no offense meant to op, or anyone!), and still have so high reliance on cloud services. Seems odd to me..

when selfhosters can just help each other storing parts of others backup.

That's essentially what Storj, Sia, etc.. are for, they're decentralized storage systems where users can contribute storage to the network which automatically distributes data over all the 'hosters'.

Filecoin showed promise as a nearly free option. I used to be a storage provider. Met a lot of other storage providers at conventions. The people involved were pretty alright. I haven't interacted with the community in a few years though. Biggest problem I saw back then was a lack of a user friendly means of storing and retrieval. That might have changed now.

Whatever option you pick please make sure you encrypt your data before you send it off.

Thanks for sharing! I'm looking into Filecoin and I'll be sure to encrypt before uploading.

I used storj.io for a while. Moved to Hetzner Storage boxes for my backup, because that's easier to configure with my restic setup.