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

Much better to do some sort of incremental or differential backup.

As someone else said, borg is a good way of doing this.

Given you're using cloud storage, you could use rclone to sync (one way, from cloud to local) to a local disk, and then use borg (on your local machine) to backup the local copies to a second drive.

Of course, it's best to have this rclone+borg setup in two locations (e.g. second location can be parents' house or kids' house) so that it's very very unlikely that the borg repo(s) get corrupted due to user error or software malfunction.

Another advantage is that they're reasonably open (modules, plugins, etc), and the base operating system is GPL (but unfortunately not the UI / modules), so you can play with it when needed.

I had to play with the source code a few times over the years, and having the ability to understand what the operating system is doing [1][2], or be able to do some hardcore recovery through the serial console [3] is pretty remarkable for a consumer storage product.

(note: I wrote these posts 5-6 years ago, and the software has evolved a lot since them. I haven't checked the source code or used the serial console recently, so would love to hear thoughts if anyone has done it recently)

[1] https://wrgms.com/reverse-engineering-synology-openssh/

[2] https://wrgms.com/synologys-secret-telnet-password/

[3] https://wrgms.com/recovering-a-failed-synology-diskstation-d...

ZFS snapshots and clones are like git for your entire filesystem. ZFS replication over ssh is like rsync but more efficient. ZFS supports multiple compression methods so you can optimize for latency or compression ratio. Zpools let you add new disks and grow your filesystem without having to mess around reformatting. Zpools support various redundancy configurations so you can survive disk failures. It also supports checksumming so you can monitor and prevent data corruption.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-zfs.html

> I assume they've improved in that regard, or are spinning platters still a safer proposition over the long term?

I don't think you need to assume..just check out what statistics are out there. Sadly, I don't know of anyone publishing numbers for consumer SSDs like Backblaze does for spinning disks.