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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?

#21

Post by mynegation »

I have encfs folder in Dropbox, works reasonably well, but I do not have any automatic process writing to this from two different machines, that may cause trouble. That gives me privacy and keeps the most important files always backed up.

For a bulk backup, once per month I bring one of the 3 portable HDDs from another place, attach it to my server and start my custom backup script that saves encrypted zips of sensitive directories and rsync-backup of everything else to it. At any time 2 or 3 HDDs are outside the house.

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

#22

Post by danhorner »

old-gregg wrote: post #7

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 f…

+1 for synology NAS. The quality and frequency of updates has been high. I've used both rsync and Time-Machine based backups.

And I too like that it's a hardware business model: I have the sense that my purchase(s) fund development of useful features, not creepy upsell opportunities.

They had a scare several years back about a remote exploit. I think it has caused them to take security and updates seriously ever since.

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

#23

Post by Jipazgqmnm »

koolba wrote: post #12

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 th…

You’ll need to set up an external borg-server ONCE. From there you can additionally sync it to where ever you want using the method you want. E.g. Google cloud. As long as it's encrypted, you don't need to bother about the hosters activities. But forget the USB-sticks.

E.g.: Borg to local RAID every 2 hours, sync RAID with cloud every 24 hours.

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

#24

Post by bluedino »

hinkley wrote: post #5

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.

We used a similar setup - for some reason the drives failed very often.

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

#25

Post by sbjs »

toyg wrote: post #11

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…

Not if I carry the USB sticks in my pocket at all times!

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

#27

Post by cascom »

tothrowaway wrote: post #15
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_ra…

#1 the information is limited, but it is available https://goo.gl/images/9zCMNR

#2 is an issue I've encountered as well

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

#28

Post by mbesto »

Backblaze for my desktop backup.

Then for large archival files I use: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

And just use Cyberduck to move the files over. Super cheap and gets the job done. Beauty of B2 is you can use a plethora of clients to move files: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html

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

#29

Post by [deleted] »

tothrowaway wrote: post #15
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_ra…

[deleted]

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

#30

Post by kencausey »

While we are on the subject I can imagine a device that would be ideal for some of my clients: A small (deck of cards/paperback book) battery powered device that connects to the office wireless network and is left on the user's desk or in a drawer overnight (when network usage is low) that communicates with the office NAS and stores a backup. The next morning the user sticks it in her purse or briefcase and leaves another for the next night. The one taken home is plugged in to charge for the next time.

This still requires the user to remember this process but it is about as minimal as I can imagine for a local backup that is mostly kept offsite.

I'm thinking about this in particular for a local non-profit that has privacy concerns with storing their data with a 3rd party.

I'm considering putting something together using a Raspberry PI or other SBC. Having the result be under a $100 USD with 128GiB-256GiB of storage would probably be necessary for it to be acceptable.

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