Hi all, I’m just getting my feet wet in self hosting and have a plan to start with Nextcloud on a Pi 4 for photo backups, and then try other things for calendar, phone backups, media hosting, etc.
One thing I worry about is losing my data. I have heard “if it’s not backed up in two locations, it’s not backed up.” I’m curious what all of you do for backing up the setup. Remote backup to hard drives in the garage? Pay for cloud backup and encrypt it? Just another backup site over wifi in the house?
I’d be most afraid of losing photos and if there were a house fire or something. So my inital thought was a way of backing up to a server in my detached garage in a weather resistent container, but I want to know what you all think. Thanks for any insight.
Once had problems with an internal drive so each device I run uses an external SSD/HDD. Anything important that has an “export data” or backup option such as Paperless I’ll export/backup & put that into Nextcloud. Nextcloud files are synced between multiple desktops, one of which then gets automatically backed up to a separate drive each week.
For all my other self host stuff I since deployed Kopia to perform nightly local backups of each thing I self host. Once per month a Kopia backup for each software gets moved to a separate drive.
On top of that, things I deem as particularly important get encrypted in Cryptomator & uploaded off site.
No doubt there’s probably better/easier ways but thats my current workflow.
I have three backups. One is my laptop where all the backups initially start. Then that gets copied to a plugin USB SSD. Then another copy goes to my server which has another USB SSD. That means I don’t have an off site backup.
I don’t have a place to host an off site backup and I’m not comfortable or interested in using cloud services. Instead I just decided that if it all goes up in flames. So be it.
It’s just data and backups are just nice a convenience. I’ll be upset but there’s more important things in life to worry about.
I’ve always lived a life of minimalism and to me stuff is stuff. None of it mattered before I was born and none of it will matter after I die. That happiest and most free feeling I ever experienced was when I spent years travelling with only a 34 litre backpack and that’s kind of been my baseline for happiness ever since.
I have Proxmox Backup Server backing up to an external drive nightly, and then about every 2 or 3 weeks also backup to a cold storage which I store offsite. (this is bad practice I know but I have enough redundancies in place of personal data that I’m ok with it).
For critical info like my personal data I have a sync-thing that is syncing to 3 devices, so for personal info I have roughly 4 copies(across different devices) + the PBS + potentially dated offsite.
I want to start by saying I am not suggesting you use any of the products these companies offer, but I’m linking to the standard strategy - 3-2-1.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/posts/backup-rule/
https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/definition/3-2-1-Backup-Strategy
- 3 copies (original and two backups)
- 2 forms of media
- 1 copy off site.
For me, I have two boxes for NAS. One is the prod, one is the backup of anything I can’t replace (or can’t replace easily). I have another at the home of a member of my family, which gets a weekly diff. I also backup an encrypted set to cloud storage I got some time ago. So I actually have 4 sets of data (1 prod + 3 backups), two off-site locations. The media portion is treated differently today - it used to be tape, DVD backups, whatever, but today I consider different devices and cloud storage to fit that bill. In which case I have an abundance of forms of storage media
Mine goes a slight bit past what’s needed for 3-2-1 which is appropriate for me. I consider 3-2-1 the minimum for any data considered critical or irreplaceable.
For me, that includes home movies, family photos, financial records, etc. It does not include my rips of my DVD collection. It does include config files and backups of services I run though.
The right backup strategy depends on your own concern about data. If I lost the photos/videos of my kids, I’d be devastated. If I lost the rips of VHS tapes my dad recorded, I’d be devastated.
If I lost the iso for a random esoteric piece of hardware that has its drivers, I’d be disappointed but its not a big deal.
Prioritize your data. Absolutely critical, important, preferred to keep, annoying but replaceable, and who cares I’ll just download it again if I have to.
Once you know how much you need to store for each of those, add a bit to plan ahead, and see what backup strategy fits as you move down the priority list, and go from there.
3-2-1 never let me down since more than two decades. I just bought an external nextcloud host. And everyone of these 3 backups was destroyed in the past and I was glad to have them in another backup. Fire at the external server host. Fire at home and a HDD failure. But not at the same time.
Your garage is not remote. Remote means somewhere it won’t be affected in case of theft, fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, that sort of thing.
I would like to see a thief try and take my server rack down a flight of stairs
Nextcloud (later Opencloud) and Immich as primary data sources, backup to:
- server itself, on mirrored drives
- NAS
- 2 external drives periodically (1-2x per week)
- off site cloud data storage
This worked and works well for me.
I copy my data to a nas at home. That copies once a day to an off-site nas. Once in a while I connect an external disk to the nas and copy all and disconnect it.
Perfect or not, compliant with backup procedures or not … it works for me and i’m happy having with an air gap backup.
The only concern I see here is the external drive. My experience has been that powered off drives fail more often than constantly-on drives. So my external drives are always powered on, I just run a replication script to them on a schedule.
But you do have good coverage, so that’s a small risk.
I know and I agree. I still want an air-gap backup. Because …it’s air gapped
My friend who lives a thousand miles away swaps hard drives with me that are backups of critical stuff. He keeps my data, I keep his. As others have said your garage is a start but you really want some sort of geographically separate backup.
That’s a really interesting idea. That makes me think it would even be better in the sense that the data would be protected rather than risk a cloud service going out of business or changed their storage location. Not that that is a likely scenario but still.
With backups two is one and one is none, so you are very much in a right track. Personally I have my stuff running on proxmox VMs with a proxmox backup server (VM as well) storing backups to Hetzner Storagebox. I’m planning to set up a another host in garage to have “local” backups too, as mine is detached as well the risk of both going up in flames in event of fire is pretty low. However, a voltage spike due to lightning on the grid or something else might blow up both hosts so that’s a threat model to be aware of. Also if your connection to garage is over copper it can cause other problems, fibre or wireless is highly recommended.
With backups it’s largely about the bandwidth available. I personally have enough so uploading to cloud is not an issue, but backing up a terabyte of data over 10Mbps connection might not work out at all.
For more info search for 3-2-1 strategy, that should give you plenty of ideas what you need to think about and what are industry best practises about making sure backups are in order.
I actually still burn 5-8 BluRay disks about twice a year with my most important data (Photos, memories etc.) which I store at my parents house as true immutable offsite backups. Furthermore I mirror my TrueNAS Backup Server every night at my brother’s place through a VPN connection .
I remember being told cdr aren’t reliable for long term storage. Are Blu-ray better? Looks like there’s something called M Disc too…
That’s why I burn new ones every 6 months. There’s always some nee stuff to add anyways and it’s easier to just replace the whole backup then.
- every VM with state backs up its state to the NAS once a day
- client devices rsync most of their home folder to the NAS once an hour
- at 3:15 in the morning, a Borg backup job starts pushing the days changes to a Hetzner storage box
Through borg, I have the Option to go back to any point in time with the backups. I will probably never need this, hence why it happens in this step, not on the rsync job to the NAS.
Things like movies and tv shows are not backed up, they are replaceable. All in all, about 2tb of documents, pictures, and VM state is backed up to Hetzner, out of the 16tb on the NAS.
Pick and choose your battles.
For stuff like movies I simply use replication as my backup.
Since I share media with fruends/family, I act as the central repository and replicate to them on a schedule (Mom on Monday, Friend 1 on Tuesday, etc), so I have a few days to catch an error. It’s not perfect but I check those replication logs weekly.
I also have 2 local replicas of media, so I’m pretty safe.
I follow the good 9pd 3 2 2 rule. Three backups, in two locations, one is remote.
First copy on an external hard drive that gets mounted only for that, then unmounted.
Second copy still at home, on a disk connected to an OpenWRT access point in the patio.
Third copy on my VPS, so remote.
Each night restic take care of all that.
