Selfhosted

I use S3 sync via the cli and use lifecycle policies to manage number of snapshots and deletion.

Some cool options for moving files to different tiers like cold and glacier but I don't know enough about it or the retrieval costs to use it just yet

Everything local is synced to NAS.
NAS is backed up to external USB-HDD with versioning (Hyperbackup).
NAS is backed up to Hetzner Storage via Kopia with versioned Snapshots off-site.

Do you have any family or friends that are willing to let a small NAS sit around somewhere? Or host a friends backup and return they host your backup? For me, this approach works well and is probably as cheap as it can get. To just backup some data over the internet, any cheap old NAS will do. I have an old NAS sitting at my parents and just manually turn it on when I'm visiting. A small startup script runs rsync without further interaction and shuts down when finished.

I’ve got two synology NASes. My current backup strategy is to backup everything between the two NASes so I have two copies of everything locally. Then I back up documents, photos, pretty much everything except TV shows and movies to Backblaze.

For internal "backups", I guess you could use a RAID setup or Snapraid. For offsite, I have a custom script that compress my data and shoot them to GDrive. It's not a lot of space so it's good. I don't backup media, I only export my photos to an external drive. Though to be good it shouldn't be in the same home as my server.

Systems backup to NAS via restic

NAS restic repo is stored online on a dedicated internal drive, which is mirrored to an external drive (normally kept offline in a safe when not bein synced), and offsite is a 3rd copy to Backblaze B2 using rclone.

I run a Windows 10 vm that shares a drive with samba, I borg/kopia backup everything to it, and it runs the backblaze client which then backs up to Backblaze personal backup.

Urbackup for workstations, and Proxmox Backup Server for my 2 Proxmox hosts.

Both configured with borg backups to rsync.net.

I haven't configured it yet, but I am planning on using rsync.net for my Synology as well (Which is mostly archive storage)

I've got a Tarsnap account backing up my especially important data every night, which is admittedly only a couple of gigabytes of scans of important documents, hard to replace files, etc. It's doing snapshot-style backup with a backup for every day in the last week, every week of the last month, every month of the last year, and the last three years. Paying less than a dollar a month for it, so it's working out.

That stuff also gets rsync'd each night onto my NAS, which has its own automated LVM snapshot system going on along the same lines, and I'm using syncthing to mirror it onto my other PCs as a final last-ditch backup (and in case I need it elsewhere). Finally, there's an external hard drive I keep manual backups on every once in a while.

Larger datasets that aren't really stuff I want to pay for on the cloud (14 TB worth) just get stored on the NAS and a drawer full of external hard drives. Not ideal, but it's just way too much data.

I'm using AWS S3. I've got a script on my RPI that runs daily and uses the AWS CLI to sync my photos etc to there, and stores it as Glacier storage.

It's about US$9 per month for 800GB of storage, at that time it was the cheapest and most convenient.

I won't go into my solution here, but the only tip I'll give you is don't use cloud based storage. Restoring is slow if we're talking terrabytes, it's expensive compared to buying a disk and your data is never truly safe.

Buy another drive, backup to it and have it on a rotation schedule. I keep my "offsite" backup in the boot of my car. If I'm not at home I'm usually away with my car.

My server is now up to 100 and something tb of storage. About 50% used. Raid 6. (Yes raid isn’t a backup. I know) Mainly media. Movies, tv, music, Books/audiobooks.

I’ve separated our media storage vs OS.

I only backup my OS and configs. It goes to an on-site nas.

If my media library dies, I’ll just slowly re-download what people want.

If I lose my os, I have one backup, other wise I’m off to work rebuilding that too.

I’m happy to pay for iCloud at this stage to backup and store sentimental or critical things.

✌️💛

My personal approach to offsite is to have my NAS, running TrueNAS Core, automatically encrypt and back up its primary pool directly to an S3-compatible service called Wasabi.

I've also considered setting up a small box with a 12TB hard drive at my parents' house a few miles away for ZFS replication.

Gocryptfs + Rclone sync to B2

Used to use freefilesync for offsite backups, but haven't in a while. Wanted to replace that with a native BTRFS offsite sync tool like Btrbk, but haven't got around to it yet

follow up - i never considered offsite backups for my data. i have a ds920+ that's got some big drives in it and thats all i need. but after reading this post i considered backup. what i went with was a qnap ts233, a wifi adapter, and 2 6t's that i had replaced with bigger ones on my syno. My syno is my daily driver and the new qnap sits on my work desk at the office, syncs with the syno, and backs up my photos and docs. Happy with this back up method. Thanks for the great post.