I’ve been considering paying for a European provider, mounting their service with rclone, and thus being transparent to most anything I host.
How do y’all backup your data?
Tape is the best medium for archiving data.
I bought an incredibly overkill tape system a few years ago and then the power supply exploded in it and I never bothered to replace it. Still, definitely worth it
I really want to use tape for backups, but holy expensive. Those tape drives are thousands of dollars.
So tape doesn’t make sense for the typical person, unless you don’t have to buy the equipment and store i.
But, if you’re even a small company it becomes cheaper to use tape.
Companies don’t like deleting data. Ever. In fact some industries have laws that say they can’t delete data.
For example, the company I work in is small, but old. Our accounting department alone requires complex automated processes to do things each day that require data to be backed up.
From the beginning of time. I shit you not. There is no compression even.
And at the drop of a hat, the IT dept needs to be able to implement a backup from any time in the past. Although this almost never happens outside of the current pay cycle, they need to have the option available.
The best way they have to facilitate this (I hate it - like I said they’re old) is to simply write everything multiple times a night. And it’s everything since we started using digital storage. Yes, it’s overkill and makes no sense, but that’s the way it is for us. And that’s the way it is for a lot of companies.
So, when we’re talking about that amount of data, and tape having a storage cost advantage of 4:1 over disk, it more than pays for all the overhead for enterprise level backups.
Damn, the last time I thought about this (20 years ago) I was able to buy a tape drive for a PC for like … I wanna say $250-300?? I forget the format, it was very very common though and tapes were dirt cheap, maybe $10-12 a pop. Worked great, if you were willing to sit around and swap tapes out as needed.
ZFS
Encrypted files sent to Google Cloud Storage (bucket) for long-term archival. Comes out pretty cheap like that.
I do an automated nightly backup via restic to Backblaze B2. Every month, I manually run a script to copy the latest backup from B2 to two local HDDs that I keep offline. Every half a year I recover the latest backup on my PC to make sure everything works in case I need it. For peace of mind, my automated backup includes a health check through healthchecks.io, so if anything goes wrong, I get a notification.
It’s pretty low-maintenance and gives a high degree of resilience:
- A ransomware attack won’t affect my local HDDs, so at most I’ll lose a month’s worth of data.
- A house fire or server failure won’t affect B2, so at most I’ll lose a day’s worth of data.
restic has been very solid, includes encryption out of the box, and I like the simplicity of it. Easily automated with cron etc. Backblaze B2 is one of the cheapest cloud storage providers I could find, an alternative might be Wasabi if you have >1TB of data.
Also you know it’s also possible to setup backups on the drive connect, also a good thing to turn off the networking beforehead 😶🌫️ (Also it’s possible to do “timer usb hub”, it’s not very off-site, but a switch can turn on every X days and the machine will mount it and do the backup, then the usb hub turns off (imagine putting it in a fireproof safe with a small hole for a usb cable))
Also, i’m using ntfy.sh for notifications And if you’re using raid, you can setup it with on a drive failure
How much are you backing up? Admittedly backblaze looks cheap but at $6 Tb leaves me with $84 pcm or just over $1000 per year.
I’m seriously considering a rpi3 with a couple of external disk in an outbuilding instead of cloud
$6 x 14Tb = $84 month x 12 months = $1008 per year, or did I miss read the prices?
