I see many posts asking about what other lemmings are hosting, but I’m curious about your backups.
I’m using duplicity myself, but I’m considering switching to borgbackup when 2.0 is stable. I’ve had some problems with duplicity. Mainly the initial sync took incredibly long and once a few directories got corrupted (could not get decrypted by gpg anymore).
I run a daily incremental backup and send the encrypted diffs to a cloud storage box. I also use SyncThing to share some files between my phone and other devices, so those get picked up by duplicity on those devices.
All devices backup to my NAS either in realtime or at short intervals throughout the day. I use recycling bins for easy restores for accidentally deleted files.
My NAS is set up on a RAID for drive redundancy (Synology RAID) and does regular backups to the cloud for active files.
Once a day I do a hyperbackup to an external HDD.
Once a month I backup to an external drive that lives offsite.
Backups to these external HDDs have versioning, so I can restore files from multiple months ago, if needed.
The biggest challenge is that as my NAS grows, it costs significantly more to expand my backups space. Cloud storage and new external drives aren’t cheap. If I had an easy way to keep a separate NAS offsite, that would considerably reduce ongoing costs.
Depending on how much storage do you need (>30 TB?), it may be cheaper to use a colocation service for a server as an offsite backup instead of cloud storage. It’s not as safe, but it can be quite cheaper, especially if for some reason you’re forced to rapidly download a lot of your data from the cloud backup. (Backblaze b2 costs $0.01/gb downloaded).
Do you have an example or website I could look at for this ‘colocation service’?
Currently using idrive as the cloud provider, which is free until the end of the year, but I’m not locked into their service. Cloud backups really only see more active files (<7TB), and the unchanging stuff like my movie or music catalogue seems reasonably safe on offsite HDD backups, so I don’t have to pay just to keep those somewhere else.
First I’d like to apologize because I originally wrote less than 30TB instead of more than 30TB, I’ve changed that in the post.
A colocation is a data center where you pay a monthly price and they’ll house your server (electricity and internet bandwidth is usually included unless with certain limits and if you need more you can always pay extra).
Here’s an example. It’s usually around $99/99€ per 1U server. If you live in/near a big city there’s probably at least a data center that offers colocation services.
But as I said, it’s only worth it if you need a lot of storage or if you move files around a lot, because bandwidth charges when using object storage tend to be quite high.
For <7 TB it isn’t worth it, but maybe in the future.
Thanks for the info. Something to consider as my needs grow 👍