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Ask HN: What is a good medium for daily incremental backups?

16 points by JonathanBeuys ↗ HN
Hello HN!

I mainly write text and code. I have a few photos.

Any opinions on what I should use for daily incremental backups?

The simplest approach seems to be a thumbdrive. These can store giant amounts of data these days.

I am not sure how reliable they are though.

Is an external SSD better?

Or even a good old spinning disk?

12 comments

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LinuxBender
If you can fit everything on a thumb-drive that is probably the most affordable option. Thumb-drives can fail so in that case I would have 1 thumb drive for each day of the week. That allows recovering from mistakes and allows for a thumb drive to fail or to be lost or eaten by the dog.
dtagames
You can get a terabyte SSD that fits in the palm of your hand. They're so small now, they're like big flash drives. And cheap, too.
eps
Samsung SSDs are like this. Some of them are actually NVMe on the inside, but they are still capped at ~450 Mb/s because of the USB interface.

That said, I ran into problems with T7 series. Sometimes they take several seconds to "spin up" and register with the USB bus, so if a machine is woken up from hibernation, the drive may appear only after the machine itself is up. Meaning, if the drive is actively used by running software, the latter will see it disappear and reappear around the hibernation, killing all open file handles and such.

But, another caveat, is that SSDs aren't recommended for long-term archival. Or at the very least this is a "common knoweldge" on the datahoarders sub. The advice is to use conventional HDDs for that.

pbc
Since you have mostly text did you considered a git private repo? Both GitHub and Gitlab offer this for free nowadays afaik.
cosmodisk
Stick it on S3 and then some local storage in addition to it.
mediumsmart
fwiw, I use an external 1 terabyte usb 3 spinning disk for the timemachine backup.
rakeman
I wouldn't consider a drive attached to your computer 24/7 a backup, more like a simple copy of your data, they're very different things. It's at risk of being accidently deleted or open to attack at the same time the computer it's connected to is, so it isn't safe to have it connected at all time. You can use cron to mount a drive via uuid to a mount point then make an rsync cron job to backup incrementally. uuid shouldn't change after partitioning the drive so I'd imagine you could label them and swap them out every so often. But I haven't tried anything like that.
zeagle
May I suggest that you use a cheap VPS running seafiles and sync the encrypted libraries locally to your machines. You get encrypted, versioned/iterative real time sync as backup in the cloud. It is also accessible from anywhere else with the password. If the vps is lost you still have local copies.

And/or cron driving rsync, rsnapshot, or both for iterative backup to the vps over sshfs. I actually use this to pull data back from the vps to my nas for local backup of documents.

Kimcha
I am using https://www.arqbackup.com/ to back up to my Microsoft OneDrive.

It’s end to end encrypted. So there are no privacy concerns.

And you get get Microsoft 365 family, which gives you 5x 1tb accounts for something like $60 per year.

This ends up super cheap and protects your data even if your house burns down as it’s off-site.

ffhhj
SSD loses information after a while without energy.

Cloud is either not private and slow, or recurrently expensive.

A 10TB+ disk unit costs around $200 and is private. You could buy a few of these and swap them every few months or yearly.