I have a 56 TB local Unraid NAS that is parity protected against single drive failure, and while I think a single drive failing and being parity recovered covers data loss 95% of the time, I’m always concerned about two drives failing or a site-/system-wide disaster that takes out the whole NAS.
For other larger local hosters who are smarter and more prepared, what do you do? Do you sync it off site? How do you deal with cost and bandwidth needs if so? What other backup strategies do you use?
(Sorry if this standard scenario has been discussed - searching didn’t turn up anything.)
Not all data is equal. I backup things i absolutely can not lose and yolo everything else. My love for this hobby does not extend to buying racks of hard drives.
Same, my unraid server is over 40 tb but I only have ~1.5 tb of critical data, being my immich photos and some files. I have an on site and off site raspberry pi with 4tb nvme SSD for nightly backups
True words of wisdom here from a self hosting perspective.
You’ll think I’m crazy, and you’re not wrong, but: sneakernet.
Every time I run the numbers on cloud providers, I’m stuck with one conclusion: shit’s expensive. Way more expensive than the cost of a few hard drives when calculated over the life expectancy of those drives.
So I use hard drives. I periodically copy everything to external, encrypted drives. Then I put those drives in a safe place off-site.
On top of that, I run much leaner and more frequent backups of more dynamic and important data. I offload those smaller backups to cloud services. Over the years I’ve picked up a number of lifetime cloud storage subscriptions from not-too-shady companies, mostly from Black Friday sales. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of most of them and it doesn’t look like they’re going to fold anytime soon. There are a lot of shady companies out there so you should be skeptical when you see “lifetime” sales, but every now and then a legit deal pops up.
I will also confess that a lot of my data is not truly backed up at all. If it’s something I could realistically recreate or redownload, I don’t bother spending much of my own time and money backing it up unless it’s, like, really really important to me. Yes, it will be a pain in the ass when shit eventually hits the fan. It’s a calculated risk.
I am watching this thread with great interest, hoping to be swayed into something more modern and robust.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VNC Virtual Network Computing for remote desktop access VPN Virtual Private Network ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
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I don’t. Of my 120tb, I only care about the 4tb of personal data and I push that to a cloud backup. The rest can just be downloaded again.
What’s your recovery needs?
It’s ok to take 6 months to backup to a cloud provider, but do you need all your data to be recovered in a short period of time? If so, cloud isn’t the solution, you’d need a duplicate set of drives nearby (but not close enough for the same flood, fire, etc.
But, if you’re ok waiting for the data to download again (and check the storage provider costs for that specific scenario), then your main factor is how much data changes after that initial 1st upload.
Sorry. Shortly after posting this and the initial QA I left for a trip.
I could definitely wait those time periods for a first backup and a restore, since I assume it’ll be a once in 10 year at worst situation. Data changes after the first upload should be show enough to keep up.
No worries, I don’t have a time limit on responses 😉
But… I took somethong like ~3 days to get an initial baxkup done.
Then ~3 years later I was at a different provider doing the same thing.
What I did do differently was to split the data into different backup pools (ie photos, music, work, etc) rather than 1 monolithic pool… that’ll make a difference.
That does make sense - also matches how I have currently sperated files so it’s a valuable idea. Thanks!
Recently helped someone get set up with backblaze B2 using Kopia, which turned out fairly affordable. It compresses and de-duplicates leading to very little storage use, and it encrypts so that Backblaze can’t read the data.
Kopia connects to it directly. To restore, you just install Kopia again and enter the same connection credentials to access the backup repository.
My personal solution is a second NAS off-site, which periodically wakes up and connects to mine via VPN, during that window Kopia is set to update my backups.
Kopia figures out what parts of the filesystem has changed very quickly, and only those changes are transferred over during each update.
The Backblaze option is something I’ve seriously considered.
Any reason this person didn’t go with the $99/year personal backup plan? It says “unlimited” and it is for my household only, but maybe I’m missing something about how difficult it is to setup on Unraid or other NAS software. B2’s $6/TB/mo rate would put me at $150/mo which is not great.
They only needed about 500GB.
And personal is for desktop systems. You have to use Backblazes macOS/Windows desktop application, and the setup is not zero-knowledge on Backblazes part. They literally advertise being able to ship you your files on a physical device if need be.
Which some people are ok with, but not what most of us would want.
You can ship encrypted files you know……?
Yes. That’s not mutually exclusive with Backblaze having access to your backups.
Them having access to them is irrelevant if they’re encrypted. What’s the issue?
You can do that with B2. Just use an application to upload that encrypts as it uploads.
The only way to achieve the same on the backup plan (because you have to use their desktop app) is to always have your entire system encrypted and never decrypt anything while the desktop app is performing a backup.
Did you not read what I said? You use their app, which copies files from your system as-is. Ensuring it never grabs a cleartext file is not practical.
That doesn’t mean it’s not encrypted on their servers……
