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Ask HN: What do you use to backup your personal files in 2019?

3 points by BadassFractal ↗ HN
Hey HN,

I'm trying to pick a tool that will require little work on my part, and will safely and affordably backup my personal files. That's photos, documents, movies, and all other sorts of stuff I might have accumulated over many years of being a computer user / hoarder.

The requirements are:

* I would store around 10 TB of data, of all types of files, but mostly made of RAW photos.

* Everything is in one place

* Everything is stored in the cloud, with some pretty high guarantees or the data not being lost

Some options I've used / considered:

* Dropbox - not that much space, but overall pretty convenient, even though it's not clear how easy it is to lose files in it if you accidentally delete something

* Backblaze - infinite space, but you have to have your external drives plugged in every 30 days to prevent it from deleting those files, which is a hassle

* Arq + S3/Glacier/B2 - more manual effort, and also could get more expensive, e.g. $40/mo at 10TB for storage alone. Also experienced some corruption issues in buggy past versions of Arq.

Please advise.

6 comments

[ 10.5 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] thread
ColinWright
I use four external multi-TB drives, swap them around every couple of days, and run rsync to copy existing files into a directory with name of the current date and time, with hard links to the previous backup. This gives a live current copy of the existing files, but reduces storage requirements by not duplicating files every time I backup.

Those drives get carried around haphazardly, are often in different physical locations, and usually only differ in content by at most a week of data.

But I'm odd, happy to write my own scripts, and don't want to trust cloud-based solutions for my personal data.

By the way, I regularly pull randomly selected files from the backups to test that they exist and are readable. Backups aren't backups unless you can restore from them, a lesson I learned the hard way three decades ago.

Also:

* What has changed since you asked this 6 years ago[0]?

* What have you already tried?

* What are you using now?

* What is your experience?

* Why don't the solutions offered there work for you?

* Will you share your experience with us?

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6708474

oil25
Curious how you are managing disk encryption for all those devices, if you are at all.
ColinWright
Until recently my threat-analysis concluded that it wasn't appropriate to run encryption on these systems (I use other systems that do use encryption). But times are changing, and now I'm starting to look at running FDE on everything. It will be a major exercise to convert, but I'm starting to look at the various options.

I'd be interested to know what other people do. If anything.

BadassFractal
Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I currently use a combination of Backblaze for everything, plus manual S3/Glacier upload through the aws cli, for only my photo assets, for redundancy. It's "ok", but not great. Like I mentioned, I'd love something like a Backblaze, but without the requirement for 30 day syncs.

Your setup is totally respectable, but I'm hoping to find something that's very much of a one-button set-and-forget vs having to manage anything myself. Possibly 2 of these services at once, in case one of them craps out and I'm stuck with no backups.

ColinWright
Cool ... I've always found it useful to sit and think carefully about what I want to achieve, what I'm willing to invest (time, effort, and money) up front, and then what I'm willing to invest on an on-going basis. Everyone has different requirements and cost/benefit balances.

Hope you find something that better meets your needs, and it would be interesting if, when you do so, you could write it up and post a link.

Cheers!

seanlane
I use syncthing to sync photos and videos from my phone, and my wife's, to a home server. Then gmvault to backup my GMail account locally.

From there, I use restic to make a first copy to an external hard drive, and then a second copy goes to Backblaze's B2 service, so there's three copies on two different mediums, with one copy off-site.

It's been rock solid over the past year or two, and the cost is about $2.50/mo with B2, storing around 450GB. Restic has been bullet proof; when I thought it was failing, turned out that a stick of faulty RAM was the true culprit.