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Ask HN: Where do you store your backups?

5 points by arcatek ↗ HN
My personal server hard drive crashed & burned a few days ago and, of course, I had no backup. Fortunately, nothing valuable was lost in the process, but still.

Anyway, I'm now working on improving my backup & restore strategy to avoid this kind of thing in the future, hence my question: where do you keep your backups? On physical hard drives? Dropbox/Drive? Simple mail attachments?

Thanks,

3 comments

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gradschool
I use ZFS running on a local file server with weekly snapshots, and also upload a selection of the most important stuff to an S3 bucket. (I recommend encrypting it before uploading it including metadata.) Redundant self healing file systems have been a thing for a while. Try a cluster of smaller drives to replace your old one. Replacing a crashed disk should be only a minor annoyance rather than a disaster.
epc
I use Apple's Time Machine for routine day-to-day backups of our household laptops. Periodically I take a bootable snapshot of each laptop using SuperDuper.

We have a separate encrypted data volume that has tax records, documents, photos, and other household media dating back to the 1980s which I back up nightly to Amazon S3 using Arq.

I also keep two physical copies of the data volume, one in our house, a second in a storage locker, which I sync up semi–manually. Same for music + video but I don't back those up online.

I briefly used recordable DVDs but found that the ink faded too quickly, regardless of alleged quality of the DVD. This became moot as disk prices dropped over the past decade.

As larger SSDs become available I'm thinking of migrating to them for archival purposes but don't know enough about how SSDs age to trust that entirely.

I keep multiple copies of the encryption keys in our household safe and a safe deposit box.

1) http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription...

2) https://www.arqbackup.com/

selectnull
I upload them to Google Cloud Storage.