Crashplan with user-specified encryption key.
Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
61–70 of 156 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#62Daily Duplicity snapshots that sync to S3, plus hourly snapshots via Back In Time to an internal drive, plus an occasional manual rsync to a portable USB drive off-site. Probably overkill, but if one backup method ever has a flaw I'm still fine.
> Probably overkill,
Yeah.. I was about to say. LOL. Have you even been in a situation where you had to restore?
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#63For low-volume data (mostly configuration files) of my personal machines, I have been using tarsnap for a couple of months now. It has saved me once already when the µSD card holding the operating system on my home server gave up the ghost, so I consider it a good investment (it helps that tarsnap is pretty cheap thanks to deduplication).
For higher volume data (source code, mostly) I use a droplet at Digital Ocean and keep my data spread across several machines at home.
On my desktop, a Mac Mini, I use Time Machine with an external ~1.7 TB USB drive that I hook up every couple of days (roughly twice a week).
It is not the most sophisticated arrangement, but it works well enough as insurance in case a machine suddenly dies. It works less well against accidentally removing files, but I have cut myself into that particular finger often enough to finally learn my lesson. ;-) [The downside of this lesson is that I've become kind of a hoarder when it comes to files. But these days, disk space is cheap, so it is not that much of a problem.]
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#64Arq ( https://www.arqbackup.com ) and AWS. As close to set it and forget it that you can get. Process: - Local TimeMachine backups - Arq backup to AWS Glacier
Note that Arq with Glacier only is usually a mistake (as discovered by the poster below), since restores need to be requested and queued up, and take hours to come back with the results. Restores are also very expensive.
As an Arq user who used Glacier previously, I much rather recommend using Google Cloud Storage:
* Nearline restore is instantaneous;
* Storage per month is >30% cheaper [1];
* Recovering data from GCS is super cheap; about 3% (!) of equivalent Glacier costs.
For the super paranoid, GCS also has more expensive multi-region buckets.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#65Daily Duplicity snapshots that sync to S3, plus hourly snapshots via Back In Time to an internal drive, plus an occasional manual rsync to a portable USB drive off-site. Probably overkill, but if one backup method ever has a flaw I'm still fine.
> Probably overkill, Yeah.. I was about to say. LOL. Have you even been in a situation where you had to restore?
Yes, I regularly test the backups by restoring a random directory to my desktop and then opening a few random files to test. For things like photos which don't change (as opposed to a document which may have been edited) I'll do a quick spot-check of file hashes as well.
I'm picky about backups and have never had an issue where files were permanently lost. I'm to the point now where if I'm not sure I want a file I'll go ahead and delete it, and then if I need it later I restore from the Back In Time snapshot.
Storage is dirt cheap, so spend the time up front getting your backup 'idiot proof' and automatic and it's totally worth it in the long term.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#66Arq ( https://www.arqbackup.com ) and AWS. As close to set it and forget it that you can get. Process: - Local TimeMachine backups - Arq backup to AWS Glacier
I used to use Arq but i wanted to pull a single 1KB file off it from a computer sitting next to me and the ETA I got was around 90 minutes. I deleted Arq and its backups after that.
If you used Arq with AWS's Glacier, that is not Arq's fault, but AWS's; Glacier is designed to be (extremely-)high-latency.
If you want low-latency restores, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000979. I've restored small, individual files with Arq + GCS several times, and each time takes just a few seconds.
All the other storage targets that Arq supports (Dropbox, S3, SFTP, Google Drive, etc.) should also be very fast to restore from.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#67I own some land in rural TN, with a winterized trailer and access to spring water. that is backup water and shelter for minimal cost. A person/year of shelf-stable food (not fun, but indefinitely survivable) is about $1000. So if I am smart about it, and fall back gracefully, every $3k-$4k in savings is a year of "backup survival". I still need to make sure I have at least a year's worth of currency in a liquid form…
If banking fails your dollars are going to be in a world of hurt. Do you invest in gold/silver, too?
Unrelated question, what part of TN is your unprotected, cash filled trailer in?
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#68Arq [1] with Google Cloud Storage here, scheduled nightly. See my other comments about pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000979.
Arq supports multiple sources and targets. When a source is an external hard disk that is only occasionally plugged in, Arq does the sensible thing and backs up the disk when it's plugged in, but otherwise leaves it alone.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#69Arq ( https://www.arqbackup.com ) and AWS. As close to set it and forget it that you can get. Process: - Local TimeMachine backups - Arq backup to AWS Glacier
I heard a lot of horror stories when people tried to get back data from Glacier so I decided that I'll use simply S3. Aren't you afraid of Glacier?
I consider Glacier as the final offsite backup in the event my apartment burns down or something terrible happens to all of my local backups. In that case I don't care about how long it might take to restore - I will throttle the recovery as needed to not blow the AWS budget.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#70Currently setting up rclone+duplicity -> rsync.net
rsync.net partly because I want a solution whereby if an attacker ever gains access to our credentials, they could not wipe all of our backups, a la http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608076/data-center/murder-... . Most other backup stories do not survive that type of threat.
rclone because it allows consolidation of various cloud data (sending that to rsync.net in case they ever get damanaged/wiped).
work+personal separate of course.