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:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
I have a borg server in the office that takes backups of all my servers. Each server stores their applications backup that gets pulled into the repo. On top of that, the borg server pushes the backup to rsync.net.
All of this is monitored by my Zabbix server
Restic to Wasabi.
I used to use Backblaze B2, until I did the maths on how much it would cost me to restore. B2 storage is cheap yes, but the egress is so fucking expensive. It would have cost me hundreds.
Wasabi storage is equally cheap, and restoring won't cost me an arm and a leg.
I use the following scripts for Restic: https://gitlab.com/finewolf-projects/restic-wrapper-scripts
wasabi is cheaper than B2 unless...
The 3 points above are how they can not charge egress for the majority of people.
Backblaze will ship you a drive up to 8TB with your restore data on it. You pay a $189 fee which includes shipping and handling and serves as a deposit to guarantee the drive while it’s in your hands. They refund the deposit when they get the drive back. Or you can keep the drive if you like.
Kopia to B2. Works great!
Came here to comment this "obscure" combination. That I use. Lol
Kopia is a solid bit of software. I run it on my VPS's, my homelab and my desktop/laptops. All to a single Backblaze repo.
I use restic/borg (depending on servers) and push to a bunch of S3 buckets on Backblaze. This applies to my desktop, my NAS and in general my non-Kubernetes data.
For Kubernetes I wrote a small tool that...well does the same for PVCs. Packs up the data with restic (soon I hope to migrate to rustic, once the library gets polished) and pushes to Backblaze.
To give an idea of the pricing, for 730GB, with daily backups or more, I pay approximately $5 a month.
Restic is fantastic. It's just one binary, has support for various cloud services (including Backblaze which I use as well), snapshots which can be mounted with FUSE. It's really quite useful. Borg I believe is similar?
Either way, I feel like today there is no reason to use awkward rsync solutions when better tools are out that have proven themselves.
Honestly, I don't. The vast majority of my data is just stuff like Linux ISOs that I could download again. Important documents and stuff like that take up so little space that I just keep them in Google Drive. Most of my personal project work is on GitHub. And while neither of those are technically backups, it's not a tragic loss if I accidentally delete everything.
Yeah it's weird, 10+ years ago or so I feel like I had SO MUCH DATA and it was always an issue. Now I really don't have anything. A few gigs of photos I guess, some various files, but that's it. I guess I used to have a lot more media like movies and porn, which I don't really need anymore.
I have a 2 x 8TB in RAID1 NAS at a family members house and I also have an OVH dedicated server with 2 x 480GB in RAID1 and 2 x 8TB in RAID1. I use rclone for my backups and keep deleted files for 30 days on the NAS and 120 days on the OVH dedicated server. Both the NAS and server connect back to my home network using WireGuard.
The OVH dedicated server also runs numerous virtual machines that host websites as well as backups of my netbox and mediawiki instance I run at home(they sync nightly).
i use duplicati to back up configs and data for docker containers to 2 cloud services. my 8 TB server is almost maxed. i need funds to buy a backup for that and expand.
I know synology (and others probably) have an app where you can back up your data to your friends NAS and vice versa, but that's taking up their storage too and cost for HDD/SSD may be prohibitive
Define which data is from value. I got 68TB of data but realistically only 3 TB are from such value I maintain several copies (Raspi + SSD) and online backup. The rest of data is stored on a cheap server build at a family member and synchronized twice a year. Make sure your systems and drives are all encrypted. And test your backups and redeployment strategy.
Ah yes automated backups, on my to-do which I'll hopefully do before a failure (famous last words). People talking about backblaze b2. I just looked. Why not use the personal one? The one computer would just be the Nas if using it for cold storage/redundancy?
Like many others here, I back up all important data from my Truenas to B2. Have a couple hundred gigs. It's like 2 bucks a month.
Locally I have a mix of SnapRAID and mirroring across 2 servers. Then I use restic to backup select directories/files into Backblaze B2 cloud storage.
edit: I also have a local Time Machine backup server and Backblaze unlimited personal computer backup for my Mac.
Backblaze B2 sync from my NAS. All my client computers use ayncthing or Nextcloud to the NAS.
Hetzner storage box, and just rsync. It takes care of snapshotting via auto snapshots. I costs like $20 for 1T I think. But there are cheaper options yoo
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.
Backblaze, move everything u want to an external attached hdd and then back that up with the backblaze client
restic hourly backup to external SSD + idrive e2
I use Borg + borgmatic (although I may be a little biased there...) and backup to BorgBase and rsync.net. When figuring out where your "cheapish" off-site backup solution should be, you need to take into account: How much data you want to store, how much you expect it to be deduplicated, how much you expect it to grow, and your needs for retrieval and egress. See some of the other comments here on some of the pros/cons of various providers.
Also, it should be said that Borg doesn't directly support non-SSH cloud storage providers, although you could always backup with Borg locally and then rclone that to a cloud provider. Restic does support non-SSH cloud storage directly, but then no borgmatic. So, 🤷.
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
I've never considered off-site storage. You got me thinking
I run a Synology NAS and use their backup solution Synology C2. It's e2e encrypted, pretty affordable and well integrated into the system, so it was basically a one-click setup. Also, they keep old versions for 30 days, but only the most recent versions count towards your quota, which makes the space usage very predictable.
I use syncthing to synchronise my collection of important stuff between my laptop, local server and VPS. My laptop then gets backed-up to an USB SSD using Time Machine. Granted, it’s not a proper backup, but it’s better than nothing.
For my photo collection I burned it to a BluRay (M-disc) and asked my SO to store it at work.
My home "offsite" backup is a second NAS at my parents house. I plan on getting two identical NASes with identical storage setup and let them replicate themselves automatically, but no money for that now.
I don't do 3 2 1, I do 3 1 1
2 spare drives and a safe deposit box ($10/yr). Swap the bank box once a month or so. My upstream bandwidth isn't enough to make cloud saves practical, and if anything happens, retrieving the drive is faster than shipping a replacement, nevermind restoring from cloud.
Of course, my system is a few TB, not a few dozen.
2 spare drives and a safe deposit box ($10/yr). Swap the bank box once a month or so. My upstream bandwidth isn't enough to make cloud saves practical, and if anything happens, retrieving the drive is faster than shipping a replacement, nevermind restoring from cloud.
Of course, my system is a few TB, not a few dozen.
Crashplan can't tell the difference between local folders and NFS mounts, and they have an unlimited size backup plan per device for like $10/month. I have 1 device with NFS mounts from many desktops and my Nas. About 9TB.
I have a local backup only drive for pictures and critical laptop backups and use rsync nightly. I also do rsync nightly to Backblaze for pictures. Figure if I can grab the drive I will have it stored offsite.
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.
Storing a hard disk in a car or any other moving vehicle is highly not recommended. The vibration will kill your drive. There are stories of companies moving drives on trolleys across their carpark to find the data has been lost.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.