I’ve only just realised this is an active community (thanks Sept25 Community Highlights) and am very excited to see what you all are up to and interested in. As a brief intro to my setup: https://spsoul.blog/what-i-self-host-and-why/
The one thing I haven’t quite worked out is backups. I know all about 3-2-1, but that’s a lot to setup for a little free homelab like mine. All I’m interested in is having a daily or weekly backup just in case my hard drive gives out . I don’t necessarily want to setup an entire RAID right now or pay another company to handle it, unless it’s relatively painless. What’s the simplest setup you’d recommend for a novice like me?
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I have been a major sinner on the backup front, but I’m now in the process of setting up automated restic encrypted backups that first copies to a different hard drive, that is then is rscynced to my Hetzner storage box (you can also swap this around - rsync to another hard drive, then use restic to dump it on the Hetzner server, but I want the backups with multiple snapshots locally as well). Primarily for Docker container configs and data for now, but I will set up similar automation for dumping stuff from my laptop on my local server and then similarly push encrypted restic repos to Hetzner. Not set up RAID or a NAS or anything like that, but I will eventually build a NAS. I am forcing myself to write the scripts in bash as well to get some more experience with it - I usually default to Python for any scripting, but in this case I would almost only use subprocess.run anyway :)
ETA: The 1TB storage box is 4 EUR a month or something like this.
Thank you! I think restic is the way to go it seems, the docker config seems reasonable. Now to find another hard drive to mount and point it to. Hetzner is very reasonably priced too!
It’s been my obsession for a while! It even starts to feel like a disorder sometimes as I’m struggling to find an ideal solution…
I ended up centralizing my most important data (family media files and personal documents) in Nextcloud. This data is backed up with Duplicacy - 1 copy to local NAS and another to Wasabi S3 bucket.
I also use Duplicacy to backup various Docker volumes of the stuff I run at home and my main PC home directory.
Apart from that, I use Time Machine for Macs with an SMB share on NAS. And Proxmox Backup Server backs up everything which is not in Docker to another NAS share. These backups are replicated with HyperBackup (Synology app) to Wasabi S3.
If you use btrfs (nice for simple ad-hoc raid1 setups) then https://github.com/digint/btrbk is a very nice tool to automate snapshots and backups over ssh.
You can also improvise a setup with an external usb drive that you only connect once a week or so to do longer term backups. This isn’t exactly an off-site backup but somewhat similar if you store that drive away from the servers.
I take daily snapshots of my Proxmox VMs and put them onto the NAS via NFS. Most of the other stuff gets copied into the NAS more or less automatically (=often forgotten) but most important things are now part of my selfhosted tools so it’s not too bad.
I still need to have a third place, off-site, but I’m not sure yet how I’ll do it. My drives are encrypted and I would want to have it the same way for the off-site station. I’m imagining something like a small box at my mom’s place that turns itself on weekly and pulls from my NAS, since she doesn’t have a public IP. I’d still need some kind of maintenance possibility but I haven’t thought this through yet.
