Prayer
Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
You don't have to worry about the backups. It the data recovery that will require divine intervention.
Jesus is my ~~copilot~~ raid parity.
Raid is backup right?
of course /s
It protects against drive failure. That is the threat I am most worried about, so it's fine for me.
That's the thing. I don't.
Two hard drives of the same size, one on site and one off site.
Where do you keep your off-site one? Like a friend or family member's house?
I keep one in a bank deposit box. It costs like $10/year, fireproof, climate controlled, and exactly the right size for a 3.5" disk. Rotate every couple of months, because it is like 10-15 minute process to get into the vault.
So your backed up data can be as old as a couple of months and requires manual interaction? I guess that's better than nothing, but I'm looking for something more automated. I'm not sure what my options are for cloud storage or if they are safe from deletion. Or if having it in a closet in a friends house is really the best option.
I have a live local backup to guard against hardware/system failure. I figure the only reason I'd have to go to the off-site backup is destruction of my home, and if that ever happens then recreating a couple of months worth of critical data will not be an undue burden.
If I had work or consulting product on my home systems, I'd probably keep a cloud backup by daily rsync, but I'm not going to spend the bandwidth to remote backup the whole system off site. It's bad enough bringing down a few tens of gigabytes - sending up several terabytes, even in the background, just isn't practical for me.
At home and at the shop where I work. At work the drives are actually stored in a Faraday cage.
I wrote my own thing. I didn't understand how the standard options worked so I gave up.
Tape is the best medium for archiving data.
I really want to use tape for backups, but holy expensive. Those tape drives are thousands of dollars.
Local to synology. Synology to AWS with synology's backup app. It costs me pennies per day.
I keep important files on my NAS, and use Borgbackup with Borgmagic for backups. I've got a storage VPS with HostHatch that's $10/month for 10TB space (was a special Black Friday deal a few years ago).
Make sure you don't just have one backup copy. If you discover that a file was corrupted three weeks ago, you should be able to restore the file from a three week old backup. rsync and rclone will only give you a single backup. Borg dedupes files across backups so storing months of daily backups often isn't a problem, especially if the files rarely change.
Also make sure that ransomware or an attacker can't mess up your backup. This means it should NOT be mounted as a file system on the client, and ideally the backup system has some way of allowing new backups while disallowing deleting old ones from the client side. Borg's "append only" mode is perfect for this. Even if an attacker were to get onto your client system and try to delete the backups, Borg's append-only mode just marks them as deleted until you run a compact
on the server side, so you can easily recover.
Manually plug in a few disks every once in a while and copy the important stuff. Disks are offline for the most part.
I do an automated nightly backup via restic to Backblaze B2. Every month, I manually run a script to copy the latest backup from B2 to two local HDDs that I keep offline. Every half a year I recover the latest backup on my PC to make sure everything works in case I need it. For peace of mind, my automated backup includes a health check through healthchecks.io, so if anything goes wrong, I get a notification.
It's pretty low-maintenance and gives a high degree of resilience:
- A ransomware attack won't affect my local HDDs, so at most I'll lose a month's worth of data.
- A house fire or server failure won't affect B2, so at most I'll lose a day's worth of data.
restic has been very solid, includes encryption out of the box, and I like the simplicity of it. Easily automated with cron etc. Backblaze B2 is one of the cheapest cloud storage providers I could find, an alternative might be Wasabi if you have >1TB of data.
How much are you backing up? Admittedly backblaze looks cheap but at $6 Tb leaves me with $84 pcm or just over $1000 per year.
I'm seriously considering a rpi3 with a couple of external disk in an outbuilding instead of cloud
The only type of data I care about is photos and video I’ve taken. Everything else is replaceable.
My phone —> immich —> backblaze b2, and some Google drive.
Linux isos I can always redownload.
rclone to dropbox and opendrive for things I care about like photo backups and RAW backups, and an encrypted rclone volume to both for things that need to be backed up, but also kept secure, such as scans of my tax returns, mortgage paperwork, etc. I maintain this script for the actual rclone automation via cron
I have a Synology NAS that holds all my important data. Then it does nightly backups to Synology C2.
Proxmox backs up to pbs and pbs is synced to B2 with rclone.
Other stuff is restic to b2.
I sync all my files across 4 different computers in my house (rsync and Nextcloud) and then backups on OneDrive and Google Drive.
Synology NAS where all computers get backed up to locally. Restic for Linux, Time Machine for Mac, active backup for Windows.
NAS backs most of its data (that I trust enough to put on the cloud) encrypted to Google drive every night, occasionally I back the NAS up to an external 8tb hard-drive.
Device sync to nextcloud -> rsync data & db onto NAS -> nightly backup to rsync.net and quarterly offsite/offline HDD swaps.
I also copy Zoneminder recordings, configs, some server logs, and my main machine’s ~/ onto the NAS.
The offsite HDD is just a bog standard USB 4TB drive with one big LUKS2 volume on it.
It’s all relatively simple. It’s easy to complicate your backups to the point where you rely on Veeam checkpointing your ESXI disks and replicating incrementals to another device that puts them all back together… but it’s much better to have a system that’s simple and just works.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters | More Letters |
---|---|
ESXi | VMWare virtual machine hypervisor |
Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
[Thread #188 for this sub, first seen 5th Oct 2023, 00:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I have a cheap 2 bay synology NAS that acts solely as a backup server for my main NAS in an offsite location as well as a USB drive locally.
Backups run every night with duplicacy
I exclude media files (movies, TV shows,...) from my backup routine due to the sheer amounts of data accumulated over time and the fact that most of it can be re-aquired using public sources in case disaster recovery is needed
I backup my ESXi VMs and NAS file shares to local server storage using an encrypted Veeam job and have a copy job to a local NAS with iSCSI storage presented.
From there I have another host VM accessing that same iSCSI share uploading the encrypted backup to Backblaze. Unlimited "local" storage for $70\y? Yes please! (iSCSI appears local to Backblaze. They know and have already started they don't care.)
I'm backing up about 4TB to them currently using this method.
I have two machines that back up to a local server using Borg. That whole server in turn backs up to Jottacloud using restic with encryption enabled.
By the way, I wouldn't use rclone for backups. Use restic or something similar that does incremental backups. Because if you do rclone and then later discover that some files were corrupted locally, then your files are gone. With incremental backups you would still be able to retrieve them.
Oh, or do you mean backing up the stuff that is on the cloud?
I use borg
Everything to Crashplan.
Critical data also goes to Tarsnap.
Docker cp piped into restic, uploading to wasabi. Works well, I recently recovered from a hard drive failure and everything just worked.
I do an s3 sync every five minutes of my important files to a versioned bucket in AWS, with S3-IA and glacier instant retrieval policies, depending on directory. This also doubles as my Dropbox replacement, and I use S3 explorer to view/sync from my phone.
restic to Wasabi.
I perform a backup once a week from my main desktop to a HDD, then once a month I copy important data/files from all nodes (proxmox, rpi's and main desktop) to 2 "cold" unplugged HDD that's the only time I connect them. I do all of that using rsync
with backup.sh and coldbackup.sh
I use syncthing for notes across mobile/desktop/notebook, for that and other important files the backup goes to Google Drive or MEGA (besides the offline backup).
I want to try S3 Glacier since is cheaper for cloud backup... has anyone tried?
I use a combination of technologies.
I keep most of my documents in sync between all my computers with SyncThing. It’s not a true backup solution, but it protects me from a drive failing in my desktop or someone stealing my laptop.
My entire drive gets backed up locally to a external hard drive using Borg. That provides me with the ability to go back in time and backs up all of my large files such as family photos and home videos.
Important documents get cloud backup with Restic to BackBlaze B2. Unfortunately, I don’t want to pay for the storage capacity to save all of my photos and videos, so those are a little less protected than they should be, but B2 gives me the peace of mind that my documents will survive a regional disaster like flooding or fire.
I use both Borg and Restic because I started with Borg many years ago and didn’t want to lose all of my backup history, but can’t use it with B2. I used to use one of the unlimited cloud single-computer solutions like Mozy or Carbonite but have multiple computers and their software was buggy, then they increased the price significantly. When I switched to B2, I found Restic worked well with it. I think they’re both solid solutions, but the way Restic works and the commands make more sense to me.
I have a lot of photos that I take. Amazon Photos gives me unlimited storage to back them all up, but it’s terrible. When Amazon Drive existed, I could grab a folder and drop it in the Photos area of Drive. My folder structure was maintained and it was easy to see what I’d already backed up or what else needed to be sent. Then Drive was discontinued and the only way to manage my photos is through the terrible web interface. There is no folder structure, putting photos in albums is unwieldy, and I have no confidence in the systems ability to give me back my photos if I needed to recover from data loss. Uploading a bunch of photos through the web page is slow and fails more often than not, leaving me to painstakingly figure out what went and what failed or just upload the whole thing again, creating duplicates. Most of the time, I can’t even find a photo or album I’m searching for. I hate that it exists and would fill a specific need if it wouldn’t have such a terrible interface.
I wish I’d have a friend who would share a few TB of storage with me but I’m pretty happy with my system, even though it has some gaps.
I've finally settled on Duplicacy. I've tried several CLI tools, messed with and love rclone, tried the other GUI backup tools, circled back to Duplicacy.
I run a weekly app data backup of my unRAID docker containers, which is stored on an external SSD attacked via USB to the server. The day after that runs duplicacy does a backup of that folder to Backblaze B2. My Immich library is backed up nightly and also sent to B2 via Duplicacy. Currently, those are the only bits of critical data on the server. I will add more as I finalize a client backup for the Win10, Linux, and MacOS devices at home, but it will follow this trend.