I have backups on a backup hard drive and also synced to B2, but I am thinking about backing up to some format to put in the cupboard.
The issue I see is that if I don’t have a catastrophic failure and instead just accidentally delete some files one day while organising and don’t realise, at some point the oldest backup state is removed and the files are gone.
The other thing is if I get hit by a bus and no one can work out how to decrypt a backup or whatever.
So I’m thinking of a plain old unencrypted copy of photos etc that anyone could find and use. Bonus points if I can just do a new CD or whatever each year with additions.
I have about 700GB of photos and videos which is the main content I’m concerned about. Do people use DVDs for this or is there something bigger? I am adding 60GB or more each year, would be nice to do one annual addition or something like that.
ZFS even if only one server is much better than most people have. If your ZFS replication is to a different building you have done pretty good. However as others have pointed out there are limits. Those servers costs you a couple bucks/month in electric (where I live my electric is 100% wind, but most of you should read CO2). You have to buy both servers, and hard drives will crash regularly.
There are a lot of trade offs, but cold storage backups are often much cheaper in the long run than the backup zfs server. And those cold backups are a lot easier to put into multiple different locations.