I look up at the clouds and pray my hard drive doesn't crap out.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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rclone local Restic backup to a hetzner storagebox.
The cheapest options I've found over the years are mostly black Friday sales on lifetime plans. Be careful who you trust, of course. There are lots of scammy ones out there, but there are also some reputable companies that have been around a good long while still offering lifetime plans. Check reviews before buying.
Over the years I've picked up cheap(ish) lifetime memberships with pCloud, Koofr, and Filen. I've already gotten my money's worth out of them.
I use Borg to create encrypted backups on an external HD, and then I periodically sync that to cloud providers. I prefer E2EE services but it's not a strict requirement for backups since Borg encrypts them anyway.
On Windows I recommend Kopia instead of Borg, at least until Borg gets an official stable windows build (planned for 2.0, currently in beta)
I exclude most things I could re-download like games and movies so 1TB covers my needs pretty well.
I bounced around a bit after Storj decided to hate consumers and institute massive minimums.
I've landed on Backblaze B2, S3 compatible. Add others have mentioned, doing a shared NAS 2 NAS hookup with a friend or family member is a nice ideal way to do it without monthly fees.
I use Borg backup from my PCs to a NAS (QNAP), and from there using the built in backup software to go off-site. My self hosted PCs will mount NAS drives directly (like immich and audiobookshelf) and those are also in the NAS off-site job.
I use Filen, I don't know if they still do it but you used to be able to buy a lifetime plan for a one-time fee that was like 50-100GB or something like that, and you could stack them. So I just bought several during a Black Friday sale.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 18 acronyms.
[Thread #91 for this comm, first seen 29th Aug 2026, 14:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
My solution is surprisingly Microsoft OneDrive, but hear me out. I have the family plan that gives you 1TB per account and you can have up to 6 in the family, giving you a total of 6TB. The thing is, I don't trust Microsoft, so I use rclone with a crypt remote that encrypts everything before it reaches OneDrive and the encryption key lives in the rclone config on my machine. Make multiple local copies of this file and you're all set. You can replicate this with any storage provider and you don't have to trust them.
Yup, once you encrypt at home just chose the cheapest / most reliable (or use multiple) depending on taste off site storage. Trust is no longer an issue.
I'd like to see some sort of MergerFS for multiple offsites with varying redundancy levels, instead of my shell script.
My cloud is at my parent's house in a different continent.
48tb of my own data and hardware.
Hard drives in an old Mionix mouse box padded with bubble wrap, regularly swapped between 2 locations.
Don't understand the downvotes here, even just burying a HDD in a waterproof container in the backyard is way better than 99.9% of users with unencrypted files in OneDrive or iWhateverTheyCallIt. Offline backups are critical against accidental deletion among other things. Part of my 3-2-1 (not buried, just offline), I like old laptops with big SSDs, makes it self sufficient.
I do this as well, offsite USB drive copy of backups from my PBS server that gets rotated every week for 4 weeks.
I only have a couple TB of important or irreplaceable data. I'm not backing up music or shows, I can just download that if I need it.
Dell Wyse 5070 off ebay. 2TB nvme in an external case I had laying around (just so happened to have been shuffling hardware around on other computers). Gave it to a relative who has their own setup with a battery backup and stuff. Tailscale and Duplicacy. 1.5 years and only issue I bumped into was the first external case I bought was cheap and bad. Went with something slightly more reputable and it's been rock solid since.
I use borg backup to a Hetzner storage box, which costs $5 a month.
For a gui interface, I've been using Pika backup.
I donated a server to my brother across the country to use as his media server, it also doubles as my own offsite backup. And vice versa for his, although he's not really tech savvy enough to care.
I want to do that with my uncle, I got him into self-hosting but I just need to save up so money so I can give him either a nas or a small server. It's always the drives that skyrocket the price.
A Hetzner Storage Box, 1TB for 3,89€
Another recommendation for storagebox from here. Cheapest option I've found and they are pretty reliable. I use proxmox backup server to sync my VMs there (encrypted of course).
I've gone up one size. 5TB for 10,90€.
Weekly cronjob that mounts the storage box, an EncFS volume and rsyncs my files.
Same, but I use Borg backup. Pretty sure hetzner storage supports Borg server to make things a touch quicker too. No issues yet!
That's a nice setup. I actually let restic do my backups. Is there an advantage of using EncFS/rsync? Like not having to use SSH?
No, well I do the first mount over sshfs, then wrap EncFS because I don't trust hetzner with my unencrypted data. rsync just makes sure I only copy whatever files changed since last run to keep traffic at a minimum.
Same. It's enough for me (I don't really have that much data) and just use rclone to back it up.
Restic. Nightly backups to local, then Cloudflare R2, then BorgBase. All free.
Wait what? Free? How much data are you backing up?
Currently a total of 1.37 GB, spread over multiple backups. That’s two host, running among other things home assistant, paperless and *arr stack (though media is not backed up).
Cloudflare has a free tier of 10 GB. I believe BorgBase is the same.
There's people that have 200TB Nas', and people talking about the 10€/month/5TB Hetzner tier. And then there's op backing up 1GB across 5 cloud provider's free tiers.
What you got in there? Your light novel library?
All my documents, music, databases, env vars + configuration from both hosts. I specifically don’t back up movies and tv shows because they’re restorable by downloading again.
I don’t have any photos in my stack anywhere. That might be why it’s so low.
Heh, to bad. I've got terabytes so I'm definitely owing for that.
Yeah, it's actually a great setup. I'd hope to achieve the same one day by moving all my media to torrents/making torrents, but my personal data alone is still hundreds of GB. I have no idea how you did it.
My music is 3 of GB, and that is just my core playlists often in bad (youtube) bitrate. 13GB for music videos.
My jellyfin db itself is like a GB.
I still have to make lower-res versions of my scanned documents, but I doubt that'll ever leave the GB, or even tens of GBs (yay bureaucracy).
I probably started early with it. Decided to have it set up from day one. My data might still grow to unfathomable sizes.
What are you using for backup?
A second nas. Both my nas' have raid. They also have revisions, and one is off except for when running backups.
A lot of stuff has a third copy on the server I run stuff on.
I may some day take your approach and make the backup nas smaller, then exclude media I have in torrents. Though restoring 10 TB over i2p may take a literal year in case of failure.
PS: the backup raid is btrfs raid :)
I’m also interested. I use wasabi, for a good number of terabytes. Reducing the costs at all would be great.
I use Backblaze B2. About 512GB for about $3-4 a month. Its my secondary backup so hopefully will never have to use it 🤣
So true, it's kinda my only offsite backup because my other copy is only the mirrored drives. Backup is so expensive 😭
Yeah it's gotten even worse with all this AI hardware shortage crap
Borgbase - 1TB for $90 a year but they have smaller options. I then use Restic as my previous Borg setup kept stopping and couldn't figure out why
Also use Borgbase for 25$/year for 250GB. Additionally my data is saved via Syncthing to several devices.
Proton
For my needs, I just use a Hetzner Storage Share and nextcloudcmd on a timer. I started doing that mostly because I already paid for the hosted Nextcloud instance and I like that it does file versioning for me and that it provides an easy to use GUI to restore files.
I use some free one but use cryptomator
Amazon Glacier at like US$23/month for around 10 TB. It’s going to be a nightmare expense to pull it all back out though, especially after building a new NAS at these current prices.
I don’t use it but I would recommend Kopia due to its content-defined chunking, deduplication, etc. I’m writing a fork of it that allows any Rclone adapter to work as the frontend or backend but it won’t be released for quite some time.
Otherwise I sync most my files to Backblaze by hand from time to time using Rclone and client-side encryption.
I see a lot of people using restic here. However, restic has no support for object locking. Depending on the backup source, an attack on the storage location itself is probable (e. g. via ransomware).
I think rustic is currently discussing implementing support for object locking, and Kopia has it already.
None of the solutions have had an official audit yet, and at least Kopia defaults to AES-GCM, where I'd really love for an auditor to tell me there are no issues with nonce reuse, but switching to ChaChaPoly-1305 is an option.
If that matters depends a lot on the individual, just something to keep in mind.
I have my important server stuff duped via syncthing to an old external USB drive attached to my office mac which then has Backblaze Personal Backup running. That backs it all up with no storage limit for £70/year on their 2 year plan.
The only downside is if the drive isn't connected for a few days, it checks it all again on reconnection.
I have about 4TB of files most of the time.
This way I have 3 copies of my files: 2 local, 1 remote.