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

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

#11

Post by toyg »

The issue with "simple" backups is that, should your house/office burn down, you lose everything, including the backups. Any alternative (like bringing the usb sticks to a safety box etc) is much more cumbersome than standard cloud-based solutions.

I have a SpiderOak subscription for 2TB that is private enough for my needs, and that's where I backup pretty much any machine i have. I also keep a low-power Linux server at home (a cubox) with two 1TB disks in raid-1, that acts as a Time Machine for the occasional quick restore. Most of my code lives in Gitlab or Bitbucket, and some business stuff in OneDrive. Family pics and videos, that are massive, get pushed every few months to Amazon Glacier.

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

#12

Post by koolba »

If you’re tech savvy and want the easy answer then check out Tarsnap[1].

If you’re tech savvy and want to save a few bucks by doing it yourself, check out borg[2]. You’ll need to set up an external server for it but at scale (TB) it’s an order of magnitude cheaper than Tarsnap.

Regardless of off site storage I’d suggest also buying two large USB drives and formatting them with LUKS. Keep them offline and only sync them occasionally as live storage isn’t really a backup.

If you’re not tech savvy I’m convinced what you’re asking for is impossible. The best a layman can do is pick a reputable provider (like the ones you’ve listed).

[1]: https://www.tarsnap.com

[2]: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

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

#13

Post by cik »

I maintain three sets of backups - two personally, and one with a third party service.

For the personal backups, I keep one at home (second location) and another in the office. In both cases, I rely on rsnapshot (http://rsnapshot.org/). It's an oldie but a goodie - I've been using it for over 15 years. It solves the rotating backup problem - and thanks to the glory of symlinks reduces my disk usage.

I also use duplicity to gpg-encrypt files that I save into SpiderOak - but feel free to use s3 buckets. I very much like having encrypted backups just work. In both cases I have my scripts notify my via a webhook when things fail - and every 7 days regardless, just so that I don't have a heart-attack wondering if anything happened.

SpiderOak is new - about 8 years. The webhook is newer, about 4. The rest is ancient and continues to work across everything, always.

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

#15

Post by tothrowaway »

cascom wrote: post #10

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 h…

I use arq as well. Some things I don't like about it are:

1. There's no information about what it is doing (which file are currently being backing up, what's the current upload rate, what's the estimated completion time, how much data is left, etc)

2. Large files (like VM images, or crypto containers) block small files from being backed up. Essentially, your backup frequency can be no more than largest_file/upload_rate (well, it's more complicated than that because of deduplication)

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

#16

Post by nextos »

I love simple software that doesn't too much magic.

For this reason, I use rsync to a btrfs volume (both local, on a USB stick, and remote over SSH).

Then I take a btrfs snapshot, so I have versioned and unduplicated backups.

Furthermore, rsync supports gitignore-like files, so you can control what gets and what doesn't get backuped in a very fine-grained way.

Tarsnap is also a great option.

For your particular use case, I'd go for both a remote server and a local pair of USB sticks to have duplicated backups in different locations all the time.

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

#17

Post by msravi »

I store my data in 3 places: 1. A 2TB WD Mybook Live 2. A $60 per year 1 TB Amazon Drive account (contemplating moving to Backblaze) 3. A $100 per year 1 TB Google Drive account.

I use rclone to sync with Google and odrive to sync with Amazon. Stuff on my phone (including photos) gets synced to Amazon and Google using the respective photos apps for photos and foldersync for other stuff.

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

#19

Post by corv »

Two FreeNAS servers on premises and in different locations with ZFS replication.

Then use SMB, NFS, Time Machine, rsync, Syncthing, sftp or anything else you like to push data to one of the FreeNAS machines.

Periodic ZFS snapshots prevent common cases of PEBCAK and ransomware.

Fully redundant, encrypted & open-source solution that can saturate 10GbE!

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

#20

Post by solox3 »

* "Syncthing" for keeping multiple copies of the current files, across devices in different locations, that will never malfunction at the same time. This is usually enough.

* "Back in Time" for keeping older file versions in external hard drives.

The two were chosen mainly because they have decent GUIs, both support diffs, and the backups can be viewed using nothing but a file explorer.

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