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 ?

  • HelloRootEnglish
    3·
    6 hours ago

    I have 2 powered RAID enclosures from icybox with 2 multi TB HDD in each one. The RAID is set to mirror the drives.

    They are connected via usb 3 to a raspberry pi which runs borgbackup.

    One is in my own place, just next to the main server.

    The other is at my parents place in another city.

    All my desktops, laptops and servers have borgmatic installed with the two pi’s as two targets. So when I create a backup it gets send to both locations. On my PCs I manually do a borg backup like once a month when I feel like it. The server computers are all on a daily schedule.

    Borg has extremely efficient compression and defuplication. So having 20 historical snapshots of the whole file storage of each device takes about 30% less space than the original size on disk.

    For example my desktop currently uses ~800GB but the borgbackup of said desktop takes only ~500GB.

    The only disadvantage I find is that there is no cross system deduplication.

    The super useful advantage is that I was able to just take the HDD enclosure, plug it into my Desktop and restore whatever files I want. I did an rsync to a blank fs once and it restored everything properly. And it’s pretty cheap. like 150$ total per backup location without any significant monthly costs.

    I used hetzners storagebox for a while for borgbackups but restoring from it was SO SLOW. And my internet connection is not stable enough to do that without interruptions for multiple days. Never again, except for using it as an extra last resort “cloud” backup.