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Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

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Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#31
post #20
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's quite expensive compared to other solutions.

It really isn't. I mean it looks expensive, until you take into account all the dedup and everything it does to reduce the cost. I put in $10 dollars a few years ago, I still have almost a $4 balance ($3.91).

How much data are you storing?

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#33
post #12

I use Arq ( https://www.arqbackup.com ) with Amazon Drive (unlimited data for $60/year) for this

In case it makes a difference for anyone: Amazon Drive does not allow commercial use. It does seem like the best deal price-wise right now.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#34
post #15

I'm surprised that no one mentioned Tarsnap yet, it's run by a well known HNer (cperciva): http://www.tarsnap.com/ It's not exactly noob friendly though.

Well it's quite expensive compared to other solutions.

To concur with my sibling commenter zie (who said that tarsnap is not that expensive):

  $ tarsnap --print-stats
                         Total size     Compressed size
  All archives           1418275826434  1212480481405
    (unique data)        5342739088     2957847871
Ie, I have ~1.3TB of data stored in total but I am only being charged ($0.0239 US per day) for what amounts to ~2.75GB after deduplication and compression.

Mind you, I have not compared tarsnap's prices to those of equivalent services, but it seems pretty reasonably-priced to me.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#35
3-2-1 rule.

I would use time machine capsule and periodically (weekly?) connect an encrypted external drive and Borg backup there. Next week a second drive, third week the first one...

Always keep one of this drive off-site.

This is just one of many options how to get reasonably safe (I use an almost this one just deja-dup instead of time machine.)

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#37
I use Time Machine, Arq and Amazon Cloud Drive:

- I have an external HDD partitioned in half: One half is for large external files that don't change much (raw files, archived data etc); and one half is a dedicated partition for Time Machine

- Time Machine backs up my laptop. If I lose my computer but not my hard drive, I can get a new one and seamlessly get the computer back to exactly how it was when I last backed it up, open tabs and all

- I also have Arq running, attached to Amazon Cloud Drive (cheapest external storage I know of). It backs up both selected portions of my laptop's disk, as well as the external hdd's non-timemachine partition (due to how TM works you can't really back it up to the cloud[1]) to "the cloud"

This leaves me with:

- Three copies of my laptop data: in the laptop, in an external hdd and in the cloud

- Two copies of larger data that can't fit, in the external hdd and in the cloud. My external HDD lives at home.

[0] Time Machine backups up once an hour, and stores backups as a simple directory structure on disk of your entire hard drive, except using hard links to old backups to avoid duplication. It keeps the last 24 hrs of hrly backups, the last 7 days of daily backups, and then weekly backups until it runs out of room.

This format simply doesn't work with the kind of backup where it scans a directory to see what's changed, because it effectively looks like you're adding hundreds of gigs of data each hour.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#38
post #35

3-2-1 rule. I would use time machine capsule and periodically (weekly?) connect an encrypted external drive and Borg backup there. Next week a second drive, third week the first one... Always keep one of this drive off-site. This is just one of many options how to get reasonably safe (I use an almost this one just deja-dup instead of time machine.)

I also use deja-dup but lately it seems to choke when trying to determine what to back up (I have about 175 GB of files, which doesn't seem outrageous). Have you had any issues with the speed? It could be that I have a long history saved on my backup drive and it's trying to apply too many incremental diffs.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#39
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's quite expensive compared to other solutions.

To concur with my sibling commenter zie (who said that tarsnap is not that expensive): $ tarsnap --print-stats Total size Compressed size All archives 1418275826434 1212480481405 (unique data) 5342739088 2957847871 Ie, I have ~1.3TB of data stored in total but I am only being charged ($0.0239 US per day) for what amounts to ~2.75GB after deduplication and compression. Mind you, I have not compared tarsnap's prices to…

Right, all providers are cheap if you barely use any storage.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#40
post #20
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's quite expensive compared to other solutions.

It really isn't. I mean it looks expensive, until you take into account all the dedup and everything it does to reduce the cost. I put in $10 dollars a few years ago, I still have almost a $4 balance ($3.91).

It depends on what you're backing up. If you're generating a lot of unique non-dedupable assets (eg you're a photographer who keeps their raws) it quickly becomes very expensive.

Don't get me wrong, I love tarsnap and used to use it, but for a lot of workloads it does not compete on price.

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