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Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?

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Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?

#1

Post by sbjs »

I'm using Github, Dropbox and iCloud, but this makes me nervous about my data's privacy and longevity for a number of reasons. Among the three services, I have ~700GB of data.

But I got to thinking, aren't USB thumb sticks reliable and big enough nowadays to fit this much data? I could just buy two 512GB sticks and use rsync to backup to them a few times per week. This way I wouldn't have to lug around an awkward hard drive if I'm ever traveling.

What strategy do you use to keep your data safe and private for the long term? Do you have a portable solution, or do you recommend something else?

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?

#3

Post by kencausey »

Certainly local backup has benefits but where it falls down in practice is that it requires manual intervention from the user. Also, if you don't store the backup media in a safe place (preferably multi-homed) then an event that causes loss of the original may also destroy the backup.

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?

#4

Post by nickjj »

I use an external USB HD and automate my backups with rsync and cron. Works great.

Here's a blog post showing everything from which drive I use to the backup script: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/automatic-offline-file-backup...

I've been using this strategy for about 20 years and it hasn't failed yet. Although in the older days I had a slaved HD and also used CDs on occasion.

I would never trust a consumer grade USB flash stick. I've had so many fail on me over the years.

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?

#5

Post by hinkley »

Thermaltake makes what I lovingly call a hard drive toaster. It’s a SATA to USB disk caddy that’s vertical so gravity holds the drive in. I use all my older .75-2TB drives and Time Machine, which you can set up to alternate backups to multiple drives. I should rotate them out to a deposit box but most of my best stuff is out on the internet anyway.

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?

#7

Post by old-gregg »

Synology or QNAP NAS. They collect backups from all computer in the house, encrypt them and ship the encrypted blobs to AWS Glacier.

Synology in particular is a fantastic platform which does way more than a traditional NAS. It's quite polished personal cloud platform (way more so than FreeNAS) and includes hundreds of apps, even the backups into the cloud can be done in different ways.

I also place a premium on the fact that Synology is a piece of hardware. The software comes built-in and taken for granted. What this means is that it's been sitting somewhere in the dark corner of my house since 2012, self-updating and not bothering me with upgrades or expired credit card / subscription, etc. It doesn't care if I run Linux/MacOS/Windows, it's just dumb storage that all of these OSes can backup to using built-in tools.

Another tool I like is Resilio Sync [1], it's a cloudless Dropbox and it's perfect to sync /Documents and /Desktop across computers at home and at work. It's not a backup tool, but very much related, i.e. if I put a file on my desktop at work I know it will end up on Synology at home and eventually will get encrypted and backed up to Glacier, and yes, without any 3rd party servers involved.

[1] https://www.resilio.com/individuals/

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?

#8

Post by galadran »

I have a 4TB Hard Drive attached to an OpenWRT router (Rasberry Pi's are also a popular choice). The router exposes a locked down SSH port (SFTP only) through a cheap $5 a month VPS.

I also use Jottacloud [1] who provide unlimited (yes unlimited) storage for 7.5 EUR a month. Based in Norway, they keep an up to date warrant canary.

Client side, I backup to both of these services using Duplicati [2] which offers client side encryption, block level deduplication and excellent integration with Jottacloud and SFTP. For synchronisation, I use Syncthing [3] since I don't want to expose plaintext documents to Jottacloud. All in all, I'm very pleased and it has required no maintainence since I set it up a year ago.

[1] https://www.jottacloud.com/en/

[2] https://www.duplicati.com/

[3] https://syncthing.net/

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?

#10

Post by cascom »

I switched to ARQ (https://www.arqbackup.com/) a while back after a near miss with a hard drive failure, and think its an amazing product - the key elements to me are that:

1. It is storage location agnostic (backup to a usb, external HD, network HD, dropbox, amazon, etc)

2. your backup data is encrypted locally before being backed up to any medium

What's great is that i can back up one set of data to an external hard dive manually as needed, another set of data to say dropbox on a nightly basis, and another set to a B2 bucket on a monthly basis (all of which are encrypted so i retain my privacy/data security).

Edit: i suppose that it is a "third party service" but i think it reliably solves for the lock-in and privacy problems you reference

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