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.


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.