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.
3,2,1.
My nas is a Synology with raid.
- Backup with versions to a single large HD via USB. This ransomware protection or accidental deletion. (Rsync)
- Offsite copy to backblaze b2.One version. (Rsync) (~$6/month) This would be natual disaster protection. flood, fire.
- Second not raided cheaper Synology at a friends on the other coast. This has ~3 versions. Sorta the backup to the first two.
3, 2, 1. ❤
Without implementing this, it’s a delusion that some company, regardless of the size and reputation, can be trusted to keep our data safe.
I use iDrive, 20TB for a couple hundred bucks a year. I’ve not found anything that compares to that in pricing. Backblaze I think it’s about $1600 a year for the same storage and the major cloud providers are much higher than that. I view cloud backups as the the last line of defense in the backup strategy. So all the nice features that most providers offer at a significant price increase just don’t make sense to me as I won’t use them. I have the iDrive Linux app running it detects what’s new in the monitored directories and shoves them up to the cloud hopefully to never be needed.
I use restic with a wrapper script to automate it on all of my machines. The backend storage can be anything that speaks S3, so B2, or iDrive would both work. I currently use Storj for my backend. It’s globally distributed storage, so no single point of failure geographically and it’s cheap. Backblaze is also a great company, but I’ve grown a little skeptical since they went public.
I use 2 matching Synology NAS systems. 1 backs up to the other daily. Then one of them backs up to Synology C2 weekly.
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 quadrupal vote for this combination.
You could trust B2 more; maybe dig into their structure. They’re solid, and not only that they provide an awesome service with their yearly HD failure rate evaluations, in which they describe the structure of their data centers.
I’m terms of NPS, I’m on their side. Unless something comes out and shady business practices, I’m brand loyal to B2. Been with then for years, and love the service, pricing, and company.
I think it depends on your needs. IIUC there storage is “single location”. Like a very significant natural disaster could take it offline or maybe even lose it. Something like S3 or Google Cloud Storage (depending on which durability you select) is multi-location (as in significantly distinct geographical regions). So still very likely that you will never lose any data, but in the extreme cases potentially you could.
If I was storing my only copy of something it would matter a lot more (although even then you are best to store with multiple providers for social reasons, not just technical) but for a backup it is fine.
Enabling multi DC redundancy is really easy though. The other providers you mentioned may have it by default, but they’re also a lot more expensive.
I love that they let me pick my own redundancy strategy, without forcing me to pay for theirs
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 restic to backblaze b2.
Yep, Duplicacy to Backblaze B2 for me
I use Storj, it’s been my favorite for years.
My backup plan includes Backrest (restic) up to B2. So far so good!
Timely post.
I was about to make one because iDrive has decided to double their prices, probably because they could.
$30/tb/year to $50/tb/year is a pretty big jump, but they were also way under the market price so capitalism gonna capital and they’re “optimizing” or someshit.
I’ve love to be able to push my stuff to some other provider for closer to that $30, but uh, yeah, no freaking clue who since $60/tb/year seems to be the more average price.
Alternately, a storage option that’s not S3-based would also probably be acceptable. Backups are ~300gb, give or take, and the stuff that does need S3-style storage I can stuff in Cloudflare’s free tier.
Yeah, it was $2.5/tb/month, now it’s $4.1/tb/month.
Still cheaper than backblaze’s $6 which seems the only other option everyone suggests, so it’ll have to do for the moment.My idrive plan went from just over $100 to $250.
I created another account, paid for another year at a promotional price, and then deleted my old account.
I will eventually have to come up with a more sustainable cloud/off site backup now that i need more than just a few TB.
Since this is really my “last resort” backup, I’m not too concerned, as anything that would require me to actually restore from this backup set would likely be catastrophic in a life-ending way.
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 borgbackup, with daily backup to borgbase.
At some point I want to set up a distributed file system between multiple locations as both a backup target and also a network share with automatic snapshots or some other undelete mechanism, but I still need to get the hardware for that and the current setup works well
I can recommend Restic with Wasabi S3 as cloud storage backend.
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.
