How I store my files
unixsheikh.com
How I store my files
1–10 of 144 posts
Re: How I store my files
#2My approach these days:
1. Hot live data on my laptop.
2. Archive dir on NAS.
It’s either 1 or 2, no overlap.
Then:
1. Backup whole laptop to USB bootable drive “when I fancy”.
2. Backup home dir to NAS using duplicacy. This is accessible via SFTP, so it works no matter where I am.
3. Backup the Archive dir of the NAS to cheap cloud storage.
Ideally I should add an external drive for the NAS to backup #3 locally, too.
Re: How I store my files
#3I put everything in a Resilio Sync folder, and keep a full sync on at least two devices (a home NAS and a cloud seedbox). Resilio Sync handles pretty much everything. You instantly get hot backup, have files immediately available on every device you have, and if you have a phone you can download any file on demand, etc. Unlike other file synchronization methods such as `rsync --delete`, it keeps a version for every file modification and moves the file to Archive when it is deleted, so you can't lose data. Also, you get encryption without the headache by using the "encrypted folder key". This syncs an encrypted copy so other devices can sync from that device.
Re: How I store my files
#4Excellent article.
The method is simple but strong.
The most important part is that it is actually implementable, examples and reasoning are provided for all steps.
Re: How I store my files
#5I use borg backup to sync all our files (from ~5 machines) to an old PC which synchronizes everything to the cloud. Borg has deduplication, compression, encryption, and saves several versions of the files which I think is crucial. Also all text-based data are on Git like software, papers, etc.
Re: How I store my files
#6It's a good discussion. I've taken a different path but with the same ideals.
1. All my live, working data is in Dropbox. I've been using my (paid) Dropbox account for over a decade. This step isn't really intended to be a backup per se, but you get the backup behavior "for free" because this is how I keep my secondary machine in sync with my primary. My Dropbox folder is also replicated to a 3rd computer in my home as another level of redundancy.
2. Everything in my home dir, especially photography, is ALSO covered by Backblaze. Having some backups elsewhere is mandatory; not enough people really understand how important this is. Should my house burn down, I still have data.
3. My primary system is a Mac, so I use Time Machine. TM is the only backup on this list I've ever actually used as a backup. When our home was robbed a number of years ago in a quickie smash-window-and-grab affair, they got my laptop. I went out and bought a new computer, plugged it into the TM drive, and in an hour or so I was right back where I left off. Hard to beat that. Even my app windows were in the same place.
4. Periodically, I take a full clone of my main machine's drive using a drive imaging tool (Mac specific; I use SuperDuper) and **store that drive at a friend's house**. This probably only happens a few times a year a this point. I should do it more often.
That tertiary computer I mentioned in step 1 is also the home NAS server / home media server. It holds the photo archive in a large outboard disk. Backblaze covers that disk, and Time Machine on that computer keeps the outboard disk backed up as well. This data is mostly static, so the images I've taken of it and stored elsewhere don't need to be updated all that often (ie, just when I migrate prior year photo data to that drive).
Re: How I store my files
#7I currently trust Restic with basically all of my long-term backups, which, according to the author, really isn't a thing I should do.
However, I'm still somewhat confident in my strategy as I backup my all of my data to two entirely different repositories, one of them backed by Google Cloud, and another by the server sitting in my pantry. So one of these repositories could get irrecoverably corrupted and I still wouldn't lose any of my data. With cloud storage becoming so cheap I've also thought about adding a third repo.
Of course this would not protect me from a hypothetical bug in Restic that corrupts all my repositories before I notice, so maybe I should also add another auto-backup solution into the mix.
Doing manual things like moving data to external storage seems like a robust strategy, but I really don't trust myself to do something like that nearly often enough for it to be useful.
Re: How I store my files
#8It's a good discussion. I've taken a different path but with the same ideals. 1. All my live, working data is in Dropbox. I've been using my (paid) Dropbox account for over a decade. This step isn't really intended to be a backup per se, but you get the backup behavior "for free" because this is how I keep my secondary machine in sync with my primary. My Dropbox folder is also replicated to a 3rd computer in my home…
My set up is strikingly similar to yours! I keep a backup in my office instead of a friend’s home but my logic is the same as yours.
Re: How I store my files
#9Being an Apple chap, I have found that Time Machine works really well. I use a Synology 5-disk NAS. It has a ton of capacity, and allows me to increase capacity, if needed.
My important stuff is in the cloud.
I have a nightly "hot backup," that is a CC clone of my main and dev drives. It used to be every 4 hours, but I found that to be overkill.
I almost never need anything more than the "hot backup."
Re: How I store my files
#10I'm near a very similar setup. Syncthing for file replication, storage/backup to ZFS TrueNAS, then a secondary backup to another ZFS system that's usually offline.
I wonder how OP does snapshot rotation.