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Ask HN: What's the best (basic/cheap) backup solution?

7 points by marojejian ↗ HN
I have very simple needs: I want to ensure that, in an extreme case, (e.g. my house burns down) my files (not covered by web services) can be retrieved.

So let's assume a TB (or a few in the future), with slow regular upload, and very rare DL access. I want to minimize cost, but also effort in sync (assume limited technical expertise).

What's the best option?

14 comments

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seanwilson
Google Drive is about $100/year for 2TB. Seems very reasonable to me for what you get.
tehlike
I use google drive too, but feeling the chills from the possibility of getting locked out one day. I am looking into hosting a camlistore instance
mdorazio
I personally use backblaze and it's been excellent. Cheap, works flawlessly in the background with minimal resources, doesn't bombard me with ads or upsells, and it's saved my ass twice now - once in an actual hard drive failure, and then when I accidentally deleted files I needed to get back (you can download them for 30 days after deletion).
emersonrsantos
Backblaze, or Amazon Glacier with the inconvenience of having to wait some hours to restore the tape backups.
quickthrower2
Back blaze is good because it’s set and forget and fairly reasonably priced. It’s one anxiety that I have now dropped that I don’t back up enough! It has also given me a reason to just use git and not github for private personal coding projects. As the code is backed up and I can use git locally there is no need to push.
bradknowles
Many tools will support multiple backends. Amazon S3 and Glacier versus Backblaze are common alternatives.

But I think more important is the front-end tool, what format it creates, whether the content is encrypted before it leaves your machines, etc....

Once you decide which front-end you want to use, then start looking at which back-end might work best with it.

For my part, I believe that it is best to do the first level of backups locally to a NAS device (with encryption before the files hit the server), and then secondarily back up the NAS device to the cloud (with another layer of encryption before the files leave your site).

atmosx
I agree, the local time machine backup saved my ass multiple times.
gramakri
Hetzner storage has some fantastic deals which supports NFS mounting. Backblaze is also good and has a reputation of being very cheap but you should be aware that the download has a cost if you download your backups often. Wasabi storage is also very cheap (s3 compatible)
atmosx
Backblaze if you have good upstream bandwidth and/or https://wasabi.com/ .

If you don’t have upstream bandwidth, try USB disks and place them in a safe place elsewhere. It’s an expensive drill in terms of commitment but I’ve seen in practice and works.

Normille
I use Duplicacy [free CLI version] [0] to back up to Amazon S3. My backup is currently around 160GB and my monthly S3 charge is usually a few cents over $2 [extrapolate accordingly for higher storage needs].

It would be cheaper still if I used Amazon Glacier but I prefer to have the speedier access, when needed.

[0] https://duplicacy.com/

giantg2
I backup onto a USB drive a couple times a year. I think it fits on 128GB, but the windows backup files covers drives that total between .5TB and 1TB.

With this backup frequency, I would lose some data. I don't generate much important data, so backing up after the few times I generate it is fine with me. The only except is for code, but I use GitHub so that is covered.

unethical_ban
Amazon Glacier with "FastGlacier" Windows software is very accessible. I backup about 100GB and I believe my bill is $1/month.
Raed667
I use a Synology NAS that backups everything on Google Drive and Dropbox. I don't have a TB of data though so I'm still in the free-tier.

Having 3 copies of the data (with one being local) is safe enough for me, you can multiply that by as much as you're willing to pay.