Hello, so, I have been self-hosting some basic stuff recently, including data storage so i don’t have to rely on external services like google drive.

It’s working fine, but I wondered what would be the best backup solutions in case something unexpected and unfortunate happens (accidentally wipe out everything, drives dying, electrical issues, house burning down, that sort of thing).

I was wondering if more experienced self-hosters had recommendations about that ?

Maybe storing a physical drive in an especially sturdy box ? Perhaps using distant cold storage solutions ? Or even something I have never heard of ?

  • PastelKeystone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    In addition to the recommendations you’re getting already, I recommend learning about Borg Backup. It has great documentation.

    https://www.borgbackup.org/

    Borgmatic is a project that makes automatic backups easier with Borg.

    https://torsion.org/borgmatic/

    If you want a GUI for your personal machines there is Vorta.

    https://vorta.borgbase.com/

    I’ve used Borg for years now and test my restores every year. Which reminds me… I should do that more often. 😅

  • eli@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Your situation sounds like a two server solution for local. So one server for hypervisor/vms and then snapshots and backups go to a separate box like a NAS. As for “house burning down”, a solution for that is off-site backups. I’m guessing building a small TrueNAS server and installing it at a friend’s house or your parents or whatever and then find a backup solution to sync(syncthing may be an answer here for you?).

    I don’t care about my homelab much, but I do care about my family photos. For that I follow my own 3-2-1 where:

    3 copies of my data

    2 copies are local

    1 copy is off-site

    I have a NAS at my house and another NAS at my parents house. They are both linked with syncthing and I do a one-way backup to the other NAS. Now, my parents are a 10 minutes away by car, so I consider that NAS “local”.

    And then I backup my NAS to backblaze for my off-site backup.

    • waterproof@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      So, setting up an entire server might be overkill for the amount of data I truly want to never lose (passwords, some pictures, some important documents, maybe some music if there is space left) , but asking a relative i see every once in a while to just keep a drive or even a USB stick in a desk somewhere is probably the easiest and reliable option.

      Thanks for the suggestion !

  • zqwzzle@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    21 hours ago

    Depends on your paranoia/fault tolerance level. In general some form of the 3-2-1 backup rule. Personally I use arqbackup:

    1. Local live copy
    2. Hourly differential backups to another network share
    3. Hourly differential backups to an s3 compatible bucket with object lock and versioning so malware can’t wipe the latest 3 months or so.

    Edit: I also forgot, 2 and 3 don’t exist unless you’ve verified that you can restore from them recently.

  • zorflieg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    Remember you aren’t just backing up the data but also backing up the hours of effort it takes to rebuild and get it how you want. If frequently backing up just the service OS you can store heaps for $2 on offerings like OVH cold archive.

    Remove yourself from the backup you’ll forget or it will be inconvenient the week it blows up, so automate it, check the automation monthly. Don’t care that the 2nd cold backup takes ages if you have a quicker main backup.

    Fireproof safes aren’t melt heatproof. Don’t rely on a local house backups for fireproofing.

    I’m a self hoster, and hate subscription services but I believe cloud storage for use with a compressed encrypted backup makes sense.

    Backup media and other stuff separately to avoid one large slow monolithic backup.

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Veeam VBR (+NFR license)
    Backs my
    Windows PC
    Several ProxMox VMs
    Linux servers

    to my NAS (NFS TrueNAS)
    and on occassion an external HDD I keep at work.
    1 of which is at home, the other at my work desk.

  • BingBong@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    My server takes weekly backups via proxmox that are pushed to an NAS. The NAS backups and some additional files are copied up to filen.io for cloud storage. Probably not as professional as many of the setups you will see but it works for me.