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

Synology is great however I'd like to caution anyone considering their enterprise gear that they do not offer traditional 24/7 support. Regardless of which unit you purchase (in our case we purchased the most expensive RU model), all support tickets are triaged and prioritized equally, and there is no phone support (unless you scream loud).

I have a home server with a lot of storage; it's running ZFS with full redundancy. If you're in the US, wait a few months and you can buy an 8TB external HDD when it goes on sale again. WD EasyStore HDDs regularly go on sale [0].

For documents and important files I usually keep an extra copy with two or more cloud storage providers. It's unlikely that these companies would suffer data loss, so the most likely cause for losing access to those files would probably be if they closed my account. Using multiple services reduces the chances of losing access to your files, since it's unlikely you'd be banned from all of them at the same time.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7fx0i0/wd_easy...

A lot of the replies either rely on third party services (albeit encrypted) or forget about the third part of the holy backup trinity of having something offsite.

It sounds like you're thinking of local backup while you're traveling, which is great. The portability of USB sticks seems perfect for your use case, although I think a 1TB stick is still a stretch, maybe look into a small self-powered external SSD drive. If using OSX you can encrypt it and use Time Machine to auto-backup when plugged in (easy) or just use an rsync script (manual).

But don't forget to ship these backups offsite once you're home. If you get a couple of 2TB drives to account for growth, you could get into the habit of depositing the current backup into offsite location, grabbing the old backup from offsite, and just rotating every couple of weeks. Offsite could be a local bank safe deposit, a work office, or out of town family. (I consider family second-party, not third-party.) Local backup means nothing if you have to evacuate due to flood (east coast hurricanes), fire (california wildfires), or any unforeseen disaster.

I use this method to backup 10TB of photography that I can't do online without a fiber uplink. Thankfully 10TB platter drives are possible these days for me to flat-rate mail to my parents across the country. (And yes, Synology for local backup, that seems to be the hit here.)

I have always kept it simple. A storage array in JBOD (non-raid) setup. I buy two of whatever drive(s) will contain the duplicated data and just do a clean mirror using whatever backup software you desire. I happen to use 4TB HGST drives in a Mediasonic PROBOX 4 tower hooked into a PCIe card in my computer that connects them all through one multichannel eSATA cable. The software I use is Allway Sync (free for up to a certain amount of backed up data per month, after that a one time fee for lifetime updates).

I do one additional thing, and it's for third-party storage. So if you're dead set on cutting out a third-party, I understand. But here me out. If the data is encrypted on the third-party system, it's largely a non-risk in terms of privacy unless your filenames themselves put your privacy at risk. I am fine with my filenames being seen, but the content being encrypted. So what I do is use Boxcryptor to encrypt the "destination" drive and then I use pCloud as my third-party storage provider. Both pCloud and Boxcryptor show up as physical drives on your computer, which I find convenient. So I have my primary source drive synced with the Boxcryptor drive/location and Boxcryptor is set up on my machine to encrypt the data on the fly as it is copied (surprisingly, this is not the default setting). Then, The pCloud software is set up to automatically sync that Boxcryptor directory where the files show in their encrypted format (the "drive" version shows them unencrypted because everything is done on the fly both ways) to my pCloud storage. In the end, I have 3 versions - the unencrypted source, the encrypted Boxcryptor copy, and the pCloud backup which contains the encrypted copy.

Also important to note - pCloud is based in Germany and thus subject to the EU data protection laws and even without that I find pCloud to be a much lesser risk in terms of data privacy than any company in the US.

I just started experimenting with Syncthing because Dropbox no longer meets my needs.

So far I'm pretty happy and impressed, it's a decentralized piece of software that Just Works (TM). My plan for backups is to spin up a VPS somewhere and have them back it up.

I also love that it can use LAN; I can finally sync up my giant mp3 collection.