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?
You must log in or register to comment.
I’m on Pcloud, server with rsync+rclone to move files from file system to cloud and use it as a unified file system.
The lifetime storage offer from pcloud has been worth it for me and I even upgraded it from 2 to 12 TB
I want to set up a backup from my Synology NAS to Pcloud. Can I ask if your setup allows you to restore from Pcloud too? Or would you have to do a fresh NAS setup and just put all your files back on the NAS and Pcloud serves more as a file backup?
I’ve been using rsync.net for a while now. It’s been stable, fast, and relatively inexpensive. There’s also the benefit that it’s easy to script automated backups directly to it. For more Dropbox-like functionality, I have a Nextcloud instance that uses rsync.net as external storage. It’s been great so far!
I like that I can interface with it in ways that I already understand (eg rclone, sync, sshfs).
Being able to run some commands on the server meant that I could use rclone to copy my AWS and OneDrive backups directly cloud-to-cloud.
They require you to buy a minimum of 800Gb, which for most people is an overkill
Is it? I’m genuinely asking. I haven’t seen statistics on how much storage people looking for cloud backup solutions use, but to me, anything under 1TB seems too small to be worth it, these days.
If you’re talking multiple Terrabytes and are located in the EU you might want to consider AWS Glacier I have like 6Tb on there and pay sub 20€ p.m. If you’re in the EU you can request one free migration download by contacting the support. Otherwise you’ll pay thousands.
I’m a long time user of jottacloud. It’s not really meant for 10TB+, but works great for what I need it to do.
@gedaliyah If you’re not married to managed cloud services, services like rsync.net or a Hetzner storage box work very well. They require more effort, but you have complete control and can do some fun things (like using rclone’s crypt module with them). Plus rsync.net is super useful if your sources use ZFS.
Of the cloud providers, Backblaze is the one that anecdotally seems most popular.
I’ve been using pcloud. They do one time upfront payments for ‘lifetime’ cloud storage. Catch a sale and it’s ~$160/TB. For something long term like backups it seems unbeatable. To the point I sort of don’t expect them to actually last forever, but if they last 2-3 years it’s a decent deal still.
Use rclone to upload my files, honestly not ideal though since it’s meant for file synchronisation not backups. Also they are dog slow. Downloading my 4TBs takes ~10 days.
I use restic to backblaze b2.
Yep, Duplicacy to Backblaze B2 for me
Same
This is actually one of my New Year’s resolutions lol. Right now, my backups are local and my offsites are a hodgepodge of cloud services (basically holding encrypted container blobs of my stuff). Not ideal.
I’m looking at signing up for rsync.net since a lot of my backups are done via rsync anyway. Plan is to keep my local backups as-is and rsync them to rsync.net.
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.
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.
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.
I use the unlimited consumer backblaze with private key on a windows VM. I provision a 40tb iscsi connection to the VM from a NAS and all kinds of various homelab systems and devices store thier backups there. Works great and is the cheapest possible option at $9 a month.
Is that not against their TOS? Could make the service more expensive for the rest of us
Bsckblaze doesn’t care, they know they’ll get their money when @[email protected] tries to get data back from backup.
Restoring data is free from backblaze.
Well yes and no. The rate at which you get your data back is where the gotcha lies anything up to 8TB is free if you send them $280 and they’ll refund the money once they get the drive back. Anything over 8TB is where it gets pricey.
And the situation where I need to restore more then 8tb would be when I lost all my original data, and the backup NAS itself.
If that happens I’m not worrying about spending $280.
And do that multiple times?
There aren’t any “gotchas” they absolutely lose money us who store more than a few TB but its worth it considering that we are in the minority.
Someone from BB posted a graph showing the distribution of data usage over all users and the VAST majority are under 1-2 TB
I’m not sure about the iscsi protocol. They allow VMs, including harddrives via USB, so the point of doing this making it more expensive does not apply considering someone could just hook up 100tb+ of USB drives and still be clear under the TOS.
If they did have a problem with this I would just do that instead.
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’ve thought about gutting an old toaster, like for toasting bread, to house a raspberry pi and instead of slices of bread you can stick harddrives into the slots. Two bays. The prime motivation is just to be able to say that I can run Linux on a toaster. Next step would be running Linux on a dead badger I guess.
Yes but can you run Doom on a dead badger
I would hope someone has made a toaster drive dock by now, missed opportunity
I’m getting this set up at my parents’. Just gotta remind them not to touch the box!
For inspiration, take a look at the Nextcloud Devices - just for the hardware ideas.
I’m still running a Nextcloud Box (with the original Western Digital drive) and it’s fine for my needs.
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.
I can recommend Restic with Wasabi S3 as cloud storage backend.
Local storage + a Veeam VBR VM
