Two Time Capsules in separate buildings.
Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
81–90 of 156 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#82I use multiple Blackblaze accounts (https://www.backblaze.com/).
My requirements, and why I picked Blackblaze:
1) Work and personal data must be kept separate. (I use multiple Blackblaze accounts.)
2) Backups must be continuous and happen behind the scenes, I must never have to manually trigger a backup.
3) Must be able to restore not just a file, but a file on a specific date (Blackblaze keeps all changes for up to 30 days... wish it was longer but this hasn't caused me any issues yet).
4) Must be secure, encrypted, and support 2FA.
5) Must allow me to access my files from a different computer, or phone.
6) Must be simple enough that my parents can use it with minimal training (I've had my 65 year-old mother on Blackblaze for about a year now... no reason not to keep family safe too).
7) Must be affordable... Blackblaze is like $50 / year per account for unlimited data. It's 1/2 the price of Dropbox, and you don't have to mess with any silly simlinks that break when Apple pushes new software updates...
Bottom line, the people at Blackblaze set out to build a product that does backups right, and for me they are succeeding. I love their product.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#83rsync to btrfs volume, then take a snapshot. 2 LOC.
I do this to a pen drive on site and to a remote volume.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#84I 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?
lots of practical things have value other than money and gold, like ammunition and whiskey.
tennessee, remember?
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#85Recently build myself a home box from Ebay parts. Two four core Xeons, 72gb DDR3 memory and six onboard SATA ports. Two 120gb SSDs running Proxmox on that for virtualisation and a 2tb drive for misc storage. Bought an LSI 9211 HBA with another eight SATA ports for fifty euros, which gets PCI passthrough'ed to a FreeNAS VM. Four cheap 2tb drives for the initial pool.
Another VM provides an instance of NextCloud locally and that's pretty much it. Works, feels secure enough and didn't cost more than 500€ total. A four disk Synology Home NAS with drives would cost more and offer significantly less.
As for online backup, being on satellite internet makes uploading pretty much anything too painful to even consider.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#86Encrypted rclone [1] to local external HDD and Amazon Cloud. [1] http://rclone.org
Thanks for making me aware of the existence of rclone. I know what my next weekend project is. Getting a proper backup system set up. :)
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#87A little Barebones PC (Intel NUC) used as a sync server, connected to a 9TB NAS (Thecus N4310 with 4X 3TB HDDs in RAID 5).
I do not like the apps included in the NAS, that's why I use the NUC (with Linux) as the "brain" of the backup process, which is done by calling rsync through various cron jobs.
The NUC and the NAS are on their own subnet (with a router dedicated to them) and not accessible from the external network, however the NUC can access a shared folder on my PC which is where it takes the data from (and then it saves it to the NAS).
I do have online, cloud-based backup for less sensitive data, so I can access that while on the move. I use the cloud Drive offer from Mailbox.org (I also use Mailbox.org for mail/calendar/notes/address book).
Lately I'm thinking of replacing the online part with my own cloud server though. Probably I could run something like mail-in-a-box and NextCloud/OwnCloud on my own online VMs. But I'm too lazy and, at least for now, I trust Mailbox.org.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#88Recently build myself a home box from Ebay parts. Two four core Xeons, 72gb DDR3 memory and six onboard SATA ports. Two 120gb SSDs running Proxmox on that for virtualisation and a 2tb drive for misc storage. Bought an LSI 9211 HBA with another eight SATA ports for fifty euros, which gets PCI passthrough'ed to a FreeNAS VM. Four cheap 2tb drives for the initial pool. Another VM provides an instance of NextCloud locall…
Yeah, I went the NAS route and now I think I should have built my own server instead, like you did. I ended up adding an Intel NUC (with Linux Debian) which does all the work and the NAS is used for storage only. The NAS runs an extremely stripped-down version of Linux which was not flexible enough for my needs.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#89Locally: QNAP NAS which accepts Time Machine backups from Apple computers. The NAS also runs a Linux container with SpiderOak on it for any NAS-only data and critical time machine backups. Endpoints also have SpiderOak.
Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
#90I live nomadically and am often without a stable-fast internet connection. So my backup solution has been catered to what I feel makes the most sense to me (Of course always open to improvements!)
I have a 1TB Google Drive plan; this stores all of my photos - whether coming in from Google Photos (Uncompressed) on my phone, GoPro, etc. as well as pretty much any sort of documents - everything goes straight to Drive. Anything I deem sensitive I throw in an encrypted volume which is then synced.
As I run macOS, I use TimeMachine for Backups - I travel with a 500GB portable SSD and store TimeMachine on there regularly. This doesn't include GoogleDrive, or any other data.
If I'm traveling somewhere, I keep my drive and laptop separate in-case one is lost.
If my computer ever fails, is stolen, etc. then I should be able to purchase a new one, restore with TimeMachine, and then camp out in an area with fast internet to restore anything on GoogleDrive I'd like, and should be able to start working again immediately.
I know I have a single point of failure with only one TimeMachine backup; I'd like to improve that. However it's also not catastrophic if it's lost; just a pain in the butt as it'd take me time to get my environment back to the way I like it.
Recently with the stories of Google locking out their users - I'd like to setup a routine of storing 'Google Takeout' on some drives and throw those in storage as I know I have a lot of information in there.