Right now, I have around 20TB of data in redundant ZFS mirrors, so I am somewhat protected against any single drive failing. Critical data is backed up at various cloud providers, but that’s only a few gigs of all my data.
Looking at S3 pricing, It seems rather unfeasible to back up my data there or on the other “big” cloud providers, as it would cost me around $180 with AWS or half of that with backblaze.
How and where do you guys back up your data?
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- Backblaze B2 for my most important stuff. Encrypted of course
- Backup HDDs and M-Discs stored at friend’s house
I just have a Synology NAS running a Hyper Backup task to an external USB HDD that I physically drive to my parents house whenever I go there, at which point the new data gets copied to another external drive I keep there using rsync.
Not the most ideal solution but it works for now. Eventually it would be nice to get another NAS to keep at my parents house and have nightly backups going over the internet.
It’s not really enabled right now, but my offsite backup is a combination of a Raspberry Pi 4B, a QNAP TL-D800C and a Tasmota WiFi power plug at a family member’s place.
I SSH in to the always-on Pi over a VPN connection, send a command to the Tasmota to turn on the QNAP disk shelf, do a
zfs sendand once it finishes it shuts down the disk shelf again.You could look into AWS Glacier or S3 Deep Storage tier. If you have 20TB stored that’s about $20/month(YMMV) which isn’t wonderful but that’s a lot of data so it’s understandable.
Being a cheapskate, if I can get something back or it’s not crucial it’s on a RAID array with snapshots, everything else is either encrypted Duplicati backups to Google Drive (Windows) or encrypted borg backups to Borgbase(Linux)
Borgbase is very reasonably priced and if you have a large storage space in GDrive due to having one of their other services it’s a good use of it.
I use Scaleway Glacier since I could actually afford to pull the data out, unlike S3.
How about good old offsite HDDs, tapes, etc. I guess it depends on the target. If it’s family photos, you probably want something like this – after all, if you get hit by a bus and stop paying the hosting bill for a couple of months, all that stuff could be gone.
Variations on the scheme include rotating media into safe deposit boxes at a bank, etc.
The amount of data I backup offsite is significantly less than 20 TB. Therefore, my answer to your question will probably not help you.
I store my offsite backups at rsync.net and in one of Hetzners Storage Boxes. For backups in general, I use Borg.
Hetzner Storage Boxes seem much more affordable than AWS, thanks for the suggestion!
However, I would not use the storage boxes as the only backup. The offer has two disadvantages.
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The boxes are regularly unavailable for some time due to maintenance work. But these maintenance times are announced in advance.
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Hetzner does not specify what kind of RAID is used.
I therefore only use my box as an additional offsite backup and to swap out less important files.
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The real question is how much of that data is irreplaceable. While I hoard like most of you I only off-site backup the hand full of TBs I can’t live without if there was a full system failure. It’s not the perfect solution but most of my hoarded data isn’t mission critical
EDIT: to answer your question though I use AWS glacier storage
Apart from the few gigs of really private and self-made data, most of it would probably be replacable, it’s just a matter of how much work that would be. On the other hand, I wonder how much of my media collection I would actually miss were it to get lost.
I will look into AWS glacier, thank you.
The egress fees from glacier are astronomical. So if you ever need them you might just decide it’s worth re-downloading. Last I checked Wasabi seemed a better option, but higher priced per month of course.
Running 2 redundant unRAID systems which mirror ZFS snapshots between systems. The main system(150TB) is the one that has all of the SMB connections to the rest of the network and allows modifications to the filesystem (with a valid login). The backup system has no public shares and exists only to replicate the main system and is just large enough to store personal documents and such.
For critical data (read: personal documents, family photos, etc), in addition to the backup server, I also keep an 8TB drive in a safe deposit box, and I bring it home about every 6 months to rsync all of the latest updates to it from the backup server.
For media (TV shows, Movies, music), it’s only “protected” against failure with unRAID’s array system with dual parity. I don’t bother with backups at all, because it’s very large, and all easily replaceable.
