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.
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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.
Do you at least encrypt those documents?
No. They’re not that sensitive. And if I did, I’d lose the ability to search their contents through the Google Drive interface.
I also use SpiderOak, and they say they use end-to-end encryption. That’s where I keep my tax returns and other finance stuff.
It seems the desktop application for SpiderOak is proprietary, so you can’t trust that it works they way they say it does. But apparently the mobile app is Free Software so maybe that one is safe to use.
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.
Restic to Wasabi.
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.
I use the following scripts for Restic: https://gitlab.com/finewolf-projects/restic-wrapper-scripts
wasabi is cheaper than B2 unless…
- 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.
Remember, this is for an offsite backup scenario.
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?
To copy a comment from reddit:
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 don’t do 3 2 1, I do 3 1 1
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.
Edited: typo
Kopia to B2. Works great!
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.
Came here to comment this “obscure” combination. That I use. Lol
Kopia is a solid bit of software. I run it on my VPS’s, my homelab and my desktop/laptops. All to a single Backblaze repo.
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.
Is getting raided by the FBI something most people worry about?
I don’t worry about getting raided by the FBI at all since I don’t live in the US lol
But apparently some people worry about it…but if those same people knew how to protect themselves while using the internet they wouldn’t need to worry at all.
Only if you know no government has ever lasted forever, and think humans are capable of great evil. Even if not…it’s just best practices…think about targeted attacks, corporate espionage, vengeance, things like that.
Given the shit I saw in Australia during the pandemic, I don’t trust the police or the government at all. I do everything I can to protect myself from them. Although I’m not worried, I do take steps to protect my data.
If you host Tor nodes, maybe.
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.
If your data is such valuable, I’m sure you took the time to setup a complete encrypted system (LUKS).
What is the alternative?
How much do you pay for that OVH server?
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Cool, that’s a beefy machine. Way more expensive than I would be comfortable with but you do get lots of power.
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.
- Backblaze B2
- External hard drives at a friend’s house
- M-Discs, copies at home and a friend’s house
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.
All of this is monitored by my Zabbix server
Locally I have a mix of SnapRAID and mirroring across 2 servers. Then I use restic to backup select directories/files into Backblaze B2 cloud storage.
Backblaze B2 sync from my NAS. All my client computers use ayncthing or Nextcloud to the NAS.
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.
Like many others here, I back up all important data from my Truenas to B2. Have a couple hundred gigs. It’s like 2 bucks a month.
