Most people realize too late that they didn’t have backups of their data or don’t realize they can easily setup their own media servers at home. What do you use and suggest? Everything from beginner tech knowledge to advance. TIA
I use Backblaze for all offsite backups
I have a Nas running nextcloud for general ease of automatically backing up anything important from my phone or pc.
Nextcloud and important things from the server are backed up using a tool called “restic” which honestly does not get enough mention here.
Restic is amazing, it supports just about every cloud storage provider out there - could be Amazon S3 or backblaze, but it could also be OneDrive or Google drive. If you’ve got some cloud storage somewhere, restic will probably support it.
Restic is super clever, it takes snapshots and only backs up any data that has changed - so it’s very space efficient and fast. I back up hourly, it only takes a few mins and if nothing has changed, there cost is also basically nothing. But you can pull back files from any snapshots you keep and when you delete a snapshot, it only deletes data that’s not used by any snapshot.
This means you can have backups going back months or years at very little data cost. You can restore a full backup, or just a specific file if you need.
Seriously, restic is amazing and more people need to know about it.
I’ll have to check it out. Restic sounds interesting.
Definitely do! It’s entirely command line driven, but don’t let that put you off, it’s quite easy to use and well thought out.
If that’s still a concern, there’s also backrest, a project that puts a web UI in front of restic:
Follow the 3-2-1 rule for all data you would be upset to lose. Having a server (really just any networked computer that can receive and store enough data) is the easiest way to accomplish “1” and “2”. Then encrypt and send that data offsite to either another server you maintain or to the cloud.
Is there a cloud service you recommend?
I recommend treating the cloud service as just a file host for one or more encrypted backup files/directories. If you do that, then you can use a huge range of hosts without worry.
A nice option is ab S3-compatible host. Whatever is reasonably cheap and well-liked. These hosts often allow you to keep two or more “versions” of your backups at free or reduced storage prices, which is a pretty great layer of added redundancy. They are also compatible with a ton of software tools.
I avoid listing the ones I personally use (I actually do 2 offsite copies) for infosec reasons.
- Pictures: On a folder on a server I syncthing to. I don’t really look at them. I used to have NextCloud for browsing them, but it was slow. I might give Immich a try
- Music: Youtube and the songs in my head. Sad, but it’s true. I have a large collection I rarely look at. I also have a rockbox I sometimes pick up and play to rejig my tastes.
- Movies/Tv shows: Kimcartoon was main goto for cartoons, but it’s down now. I use other sites. Movies, usually I find some recommendation on Lemmy and then I go find a nice DCC on an irc server somewhere with irssi. I had JellyFin for a bit, but I just don’t watch movies or series that often.
- Backups: Some in the cloud. Rest in a big old hard drive. Plug it in once a year, update and tidy it up. Power down, back into cold storage.
I’ve got a beginner 2 bay NAS set up with about 18TB for all my family’s media.
Pictures from our phones are also backed up in Google Photos. Not private at all but it works as an off site option.
My setup is simple:
- Pictures: I don’t take many and rarely look at them tbh. So they just sit on my laptops NVMe
- Music: I only ever use cmus for listening to music => Therefore music is also only locally on my laptop, managed with beets
- Movies/Tv Shows: I have jellyfin running on a raspberry Pi 4. For single user use this works fine (even transcoding DVD quality works). For multi user or higher resolution transcoding this probably won’t work.
- Backups: One off-site backup at a cloud storage provider using restic and one backup on a USB hdd I simply plug in every other week.
My recommendation is: Keep it as simple as possible. In the past I created the craziest setups, but it turns out that in every day life I have neither the time nor motivation to maintain that shit.
Hard copy.
Photos in a photo album, documents in a filing cabinet.
Okay but like what if your house burns down
It’s good to have some kind of backup for worst case scenariosOtherwise I totally agree. I feel like the only way I’ll actually look at my photos is if they’re physically there for me to see.
My home server has an NVMe that has the OS and all the Docker Compose stacks and their database data. The big data (photos, movies, backups, etc) are on a big 6 drive RAID 6 array. The NVMe gets backed up to the RAID every night. They go into folders named after the day of the week, so I’ve always got 7 days worth. Then every week or so, I rsync the whole RAID to a big drive at my parent’s house. The reason I do that manually is because I don’t want it happening if I get hit with a ransomware attack.
That was all relatively easy to set up, but server administration is also my profession, so for normal people, I recommend an easier home server setup and a commercial backup solution.
I’m actually working on an open source backup solution based on my deduplicating WebDAV server, Nephele. If I can pull it off, it’ll be free and open source to run on your own hardware, or you can pay my company to back up to my hardware.
SMB file share, nightly backup for files, monthly backup for entertainment media, both to a RAID 1 18TB backup mount. Important docs also copied to a flash drive that I keep at an off site location, and swap about once a month.
