Why I Built My Own Backup Storage and You Should Too
Creating Backup Storage Sucks
After years of frustration with cloud storage subscriptions, one developer decided to build a free, personal backup system using the 3-2-1 rule. He details his choices for each layer: Syncthing for live sync across devices, restic for local backups to an external drive, and a manual rclone sync to Google Drive for offsite storage. Along the way, he shares hard-won lessons about file systems, Tailscale, and the quirks of iOS and Android.
Tailscale is the true king; syncthing is amazing; iOS is better than I remembered; Android has gotten almost as bad as Windows.
- sdcfgy
Some advice from someone who's done it wrong for years and dealt with dead people who have done it wrong for years.
Firstly don't try and run a corporate level backup solution or NAS with terabytes of storage and tape at home. You're going to drop dead one day and everyone will hate you for what you leave them to deal with. They will have no idea how to pick through the remains to get important stuff out. It took me a whole 3 days, as someone who knows how this works, to get into a dead relative's NAS appliance and find any mention of any info to get into his EV which had basically bricked itself in the driveway while he was in hospital.
Secondly, delete everything. Not joking. Delete as much as you can. Everything you've watched, delete it. All the old emails, delete them. Tracks you don't like on CDs you've ripped, delete them. Old software ISOs, delete them. Thousands of photos of the same thing taken 1 second apart, delete them. Thousands of PDFs of books you will never read, delete them. I went down from a whopping 8TB to 300Gb doing that and it's still shrinking monthly. Eventually it'll fit on one mediocre computer and that makes life so so so much easier.
Then look at your backup strategy. It'll look simple then. Mine is three external disks.
1. 1TB T7 shield (not encrypted) which lives at my partner's house and gets an rsync once a month.
2. 1TB T7 shield (encrypted) which lives in my bag and gets an rdiff-backup once a week.
3. 2TB Lacie HDD (not encrypted) which li […]
- bblb
One thing I would add to a modern backup strategy: a deferred offline copy
Sure it's bothersome to use the sneakernet once a month (manually copy data to USB stick and stash it somewhere), but when that ransomware hits (can happen on personal devices also), it literally can't access the offline copy, and try to encrypt that one also.
Immutable backup solutions are code and thus eventually defeatable from the remote attackers point of view. Offline requires physical access, and maybe a big enough wrench to get the USB stick's disk encryption PIN out of you.
- fc417fc802
> One of the other materials that I could not figure out how to back up properly is emails. The reason is that there is no clear way to back it up systematically
Doesn't that depend entirely on the storage format? For example if you use thunderbird as a client it has database files that you can copy. Since you say that one of your devices is running arch you should check out some of the email options in the repos. There are at least a few of options that can act as a middleman to bridge between your external accounts and your clients.
> So having a plan to roll back to a stable state might be helfpul. I installed and set up Timeshift for this
Snapshots make this trivial. Particularly in the case of btrfs if you configure your bootloader to always use the default subvolume then rollback becomes just `btrfs subvolme set-default`.
- akersten
What the author describes here is hard because it's "simple."
What's simple because it's "hard" is replacing parts 2 & 3 with a network appliance like TrueNAS running a zfs pool that syncs to backblaze every night. Yeah you have to learn a bit but it won't fall in weird ways like the hard drive part here will just fail to mount one night and not back things up for 3 months until you notice. My 2¢
- drdexebtjl
It sounds like most of your frustration can be eliminated by actually using your NAS as the ground-truth for all data, using something like SMB/NFS instead of SyncThing.
Then you only need to backup the NAS.