My upload bandwidth is low enough to make offsite backup not practical (~1mbps). Anyone else with the same issue? How do you handle it?
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?
#102My upload bandwidth is low enough to make offsite backup not practical (~1mbps). Anyone else with the same issue? How do you handle it?
You can have two encrypted external HDDs and mantain one with you, and the other in a friend/family house. Rotate frequently.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#103Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#104A 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. I…
The common wisdom always says have an off-site backup. But what if the backup is small enough to fit in your pocket? I always have a Swiss Army knife on me anyway so if I have a backup thumb drive that’s the same size, it should fit just fine, and be as safe as my house keys. I really think we’re in a new age of self sufficiency because of advances in technology and physical storage size.
One of the biggest benefits of off-site backup is stability. That's why something like a bank's safe-deposit box or my parent's firesafe are my preferred locations. A backup in your pocket is great until you lose your keys, your pants get a hole in the pocket, you get pushed into a pond, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#105Do it the old fashioned way. Full backup to a hard drive, store that offsite and do incremental backups on USB sticks. There are dozens of good tools.
Personally, I manage media separately from normal files, and use hard drives for media, sticks for files.
It’s easier, cheaper and more secure than any backup service.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#106I use duplicity for create, encrypt backups. To store them I use two USB SSD drives (in two separate locations); for off-site I use AWS' glacier.
The backups are scheduled with jobs in self-hosted Jenkins instances.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#107The 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!
I thought I was bright carrying around my portable hard drive with my backups on my backpack.
Until one day I got robbed and I lost both my laptop AND my backups... (and USB sticks, etc). That sucked.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#108Synology 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…
How can you advise synology when their system doesn't even have FULL DISK ENCRYPTION? As longas it doesn't have it, i wont be even interested looking at their platform.
Can you imagine it? NAS'es usually are targeted for business users, yet they dont have full disk encryption...
For now i'm using QNAP, in terms of possible features i believe QNAP is little ahead (x86 cpu, virtualization, containers, fde). It has all what synology has + more.
However their platform is badly constructed, most processes are esentially running as root user... You get like firmware update every 2 weeks. It doesn't mean that there are bugs tho. I'm running it for 2 years and never had a problem.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#109I use github for all my private code, and then I backup my entire workspace as an encrypted 7zip file to Google Drive 2-3 times a year (about 10 gigs). There are plenty of services that do client side encryption + cloud service, but Google Drive is probably the only one you can do completely for free.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?
#110Hourly 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…
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