At your scales, bluray discs are probably the most affordable per GiB year (looks like 2.5T spread out across 100x discs is about $80 right now and should last 15-25 years or more). Double or triple your data and you should just use cold hard drives. 10x or more and you should probably use magnetic tapes. Mirror everything 2-3x and do yearly integrity checks (I just write the SHA of my discs on the disc label) and your data should last a good long time.
Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
41–50 of 112 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#42Hourly backups to a NAS and one of two local USB3 SSD drives that I rotate weekly.
You can get around 400 MBps write rate on the latter [1], which is pretty decent by itself, but I also use bvckup2 that does block-level delta updates and that cuts down backup time to around 10 minutes. That's on a bit less than 1TB of data mostly comprising very large encrypted file containers and VMs. Worked pretty well so far, went through a couple of restores just fine, so no complaints.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#43I 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 c…
> 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).
I love simple software too: that's why I use lmnop and throw in a little xyz.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#44restic to Google Cloud Storage. Their Coldline storage costs a few euros per month for ~1Tb. And I can easily change backends if I want, restic supports many options.
The only problem is low upload speeds for residential customers.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#45If 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…
Tarsnap is a third-party service which in turn depends on S3. The author specifically requested solutions which do not depend on a third party.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#46You can buy USB3 M.2 SSD enclosures for ~$20. They are larger than normal flash drives at about 5" long but still reasonably pocketable and much higher performance than normal flash drives. Drop in a 1TB SSD for ~$200 and you're good to go. I had a friend in college that backed up all of his files on a flash drive but he used git rather than rsync.
> Drop in a 1TB SSD for ~$200 and you're good to go. O_o ...For some reason, my mental model of SSD rates was stuck in 2014 at $0.50/GB. As I type this, my laptop is busy moving a VM image over to the NAS to free up some space on my 256 GB SSD. But no, according to https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/ and https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/ , you can indeed find SSDs at $0.20/…
You can get even cheaper, the Micron 1100 2TB drives are only $0.15/GB at $300.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#47I 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…
Jottacloud sounds interesting, how do you integrate with it, doesn't seem to offer any standard API's besides their own CLI.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#48[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#49I use Bvckup 2 (https://bvckup2.com/) to backup on to a 4 TB external drive. I also have Duplicati (https://www.duplicati.com/) running to backup those backups onto OneDrive and Backblaze.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#50Hourly backups to a NAS and one of two local USB3 SSD drives that I rotate weekly. You can get around 400 MBps write rate on the latter [1], which is pretty decent by itself, but I also use bvckup2 that does block-level delta updates and that cuts down backup time to around 10 minutes. That's on a bit less than 1TB of data mostly comprising very large encrypted file containers and VMs. Worked pretty well so far, went…
What's your use case for such a strict backup regime?