I’m interested to hear what do people use as their cloud backup and the cost of it. I currently use idrive e2 storage at 5$ per TB a month. Trying to see if there is any better deal anywhere and just curious on everyone’s thoughts.
To me backups in the cloud are no backups. I could never physically get to the disk and someone else controls my account.
My 1st backups go to a NAS (with encrypted raid disks) in my garage that is 35 meters away from my house. The 2nd backup are encrypted files (encrypted disks are not practical, it’s a challenge after power-dips etc) to a storage at my daughters place. That second option goes via my own vpn which also gives me the opportunity to go out on the internet there (convenient for some tv shows my wife wanna see)
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 use restic to:
- A Raspberry Pi with an external 4 TB SSD at a friend’s house a few hours drive away
- Jottacloud
Storj
I use Backblaze personal backup for $9 per month with unlimited storage. I’ve backed up many terabytes without an issue.
Yup. My main living data is on a NAS, my on-site backup is an external USB enclosure with a SATA hard drive hooked up to a Mac Mini, all so that I can leverage a Backblaze account to back up the external hard drive with unlimited data.
Pro tip—there is a docker container that simulates windows with Backblaze in it so you can use the unlimited plan in Linux.
Got a link for that?
I don’t have any :')
My “cloud backup” is a NAS in another room. If the house cathes fire, there’s an earthquake or the volcano I live close erupts I say bye bye to everything
I am the same way. My backup is on the other side of the room. If my house goes up in flames, I’ll have bigger issues to deal with, like my house going up in flames.
Data is just data. It wasn’t there when I was born and it’s all encrypted now so when I die, I want the next person to wipe it clean and use the hardware for themselves.
Having a backup is convenient but it’s not the end of the world if I lose it.
To be fair if my dad or grandpa hands me his backup, I’d love to keep it and look at those old photos and videos. They hold a greater value than the hardware itself
That’s fair
I have a very different view on data, physical property and familial relationships. Everything is temporary to me and I’ve prefer my stuff to be reused rather than act as an archive to my own life.
My pictures, music and technology related projects are just for myself. Anything I wish to share after my death is stored on an unencrypted drive connected to a Raspberry Pi that acts as my web facing server that serves only static data. It’s mainly a bunch of wikis, linux/shell scripting references, some of my git repositories, some survival type ebooks and some other random stuff.
I’ve lost data multiple times throughout my life so I know I’d be disappointed but not sad if I lost all my data one more time. I do have multiple backups now so I at least have some data resilience compared to the past.
It’s always interesting to see different viewpoints, thank you :)
To be fair… if all that happens, you’re probably toast too
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.
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.
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.
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?
I’m also interested. I use wasabi, for a good number of terabytes. Reducing the costs at all would be great.
Most of the time just rclone pointing to the cheapest storage provider I can find and a daily task at night in my NAS.
Now I’m using idrive
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.
What are you using to get it there and back?
I’m asking because I had been using this for years and only after a catastrophic event, discovered that my “helpful” backup software had turned on versioning which AWS, also helpfully, doesn’t explicitly tell you when you attempt to delete old backup sets, showing no objects but charging you anyway.
I did recover all my data after a catastrophic event, but it was an expensive experience to put it mildly.
I had a Synology DS412+ using their glacier interface to backup offsite. Pictures, personal dvd/bluray collections and music collections. Moved internationally and the NAS/hard drives didn’t fit into our weight/damage potential allowance. So we opted for the nuclear option of keeping it all on ice and paying through the nose to get it all back locally later.
Looking at one of the UGREEN boxes and some sort of port of the synology os/apps to pull it back down. Worst case scenario, I grab a new synology box and pay their hardware premium to recover things. The hope is to move away from both Synology and Amazon as much as possible.
Nothing is set in stone though, it’s a project for later once the savings is replenished and we have some more discretionary funds.
OVH S3 is extremely cost effective and in a privacy respecting jurisdiction far from DrumpfGhanistan
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
I use borg backup to a Hetzner storage box, which costs $5 a month.
For a gui interface, I’ve been using Pika backup.










