I’m planning on setting up a nas/home server (primarily storage with some jellyfin and nextcloud and such mixed in) and since it is primarily for data storage I’d like to follow the data preservation rules of 3-2-1 backups. 3 copies on 2 mediums with 1 offsite - well actually I’m more trying to go for a 2-1 with 2 copies and one offsite, but that’s besides the point. Now I’m wondering how to do the offsite backup properly.
My main goal would be to have an automatic system that does full system backups at a reasonable rate (I assume daily would be a bit much considering it’s gonna be a few TB worth of HDDs which aren’t exactly fast, but maybe weekly?) and then have 2-3 of those backups offsite at once as a sort of version control, if possible.
This has two components, the local upload system and the offsite storage provider. First the local system:
What is good software to encrypt the data before/while it’s uploaded?
While I’d preferably upload the data to a provider I trust, accidents happen, and since they don’t need to access the data, I’d prefer them not being able to, maliciously or not, so what is a good way to encrypt the data before it leaves my system?
What is a good way to upload the data?
After it has been encrypted, it needs to be sent. Is there any good software that can upload backups automatically on regular intervals? Maybe something that also handles the encryption part on the way?
Then there’s the offsite storage provider. Personally I’d appreciate as many suggestions as possible, as there is of course no one size fits all, so if you’ve got good experiences with any, please do send their names. I’m basically just looking for network attached drives. I send my data to them, I leave it there and trust it stays there, and in case too many drives in my system fail for RAID-Z to handle, so 2, I’d like to be able to get the data off there after I’ve replaced my drives. That’s all I really need from them.
For reference, this is gonna be my first NAS/Server/Anything of this sort. I realize it’s mostly a regular computer and am familiar enough with Linux, so I can handle that basic stuff, but for the things you wouldn’t do with a normal computer I am quite unfamiliar, so if any questions here seem dumb, I apologize. Thank you in advance for any information!
I don’t 🙃
Veeam Backup&Replication with a NFR license for me.
My personal setup:
First backup: Just a back up to a virtual drive stored on my NAS
Offsite backup: Essentially an export of what is available and then creates a full or incremental backup to an external USB drive.
I have two of those. One I keep at home in case my NAS explodes. The second is at my work place.
The off-site only contains my most important pieces of data.
As for frequency: As often as I remember to make one as it requires manual interaction.Our clients have (depending on their size) the following setups:
2 or more endpoints (excluding exceptions):
Veeam BR Server
First backup to NAS
Second backup (copy of the first) to USB drives (min. of 3. 1 connected, 2 somewhere stored in the business, 3 at home/off-site. Daily rotation)
Optionally a S3 compatible cloud backup.Bigger customers maybe have mirroring but we have those cases very rarely.
Edit: The backups can be encrypted at all steps (first backup or backup copys)
Edit 2: Veeam B/R is not (F)OSS but very reasonable for the free community edition. Has support for Windows, mac and Linux (some distros, only x64/x86). The NFR license can be aquired relatively easy (from here and they didn’t check me in any way.
I like the software as it’s very powerful and versatile. Both geared towards Fortune>500 and small shops/deployments.
And the next version will see a full linux version both as a single install and a virtual appliance.
They also have a setup for hardened repositories.I’m just skipping that. How am I going to backup 48TB on an off-site backup?!
Only back up the essentials like photos and documents or rare media.
Don’t care about stuff like Avengers 4K that can easily be reaquiredGet a tiny ITX box with a couple 20TB refurbished HDDs, stick it at a friend’s house
In theory. But I already spent my pension for those 64TB drives (raidz2) xD. Getting off-site backup for all of that feels like such a waste of money (until you regret it). I know it isn’t a backup, but I’m praying the Raidz2 will be enough protection.
Just a friendly reminder that RAID is not a backup…
Just consider if something accidentally overwrites some / all your files. This is a perfectly legit action and the checksums will happily match that new data, but your file(s) are gone…
Do you have to back up everything off site?
Maybe there are just a few critical files you need a disaster recovery plan for, and the rest is just covered by your raidz
Understanding the risks is half the battle, but we can only do what we can do.
I use asustor Nas, one at my house south east US, one at my sister’s house northeast us. The asus os takes care of the backup every night. It’s not cheap but if you want it done right.
Both run 4 drives in raid 5. Pictures backup to the hdd and a raid 1 set of nvme in the nas. The rest is just movies and TV shows for plex so I don’t really care about those. The pictures are the main thing. I feel like that’s as safe I can be.
Hetzner Storagebox
Syncthing to a pi at my parents place.
A pi with multiple terabytes of storage?
Huh, that’s a pretty good idea. I already have a Raspberry Pi setup at home, and it wouldn’t be hard to duplicate in other location.
Low power server in a friends basement running syncthing
But doesn’t that sync in real-time? Making it not a true backup?
In theory you could setup a cron with a docker compose to fire up a container, sync and once all endpoint jobs are synced to shut down.
As it seemingly has an API it should be possible.Have it sync the backup files from the -2- part. You can then copy them out of the syncthing folder to a local one with a cron to rotate them. That way you get the sync offsite and you can keep them out of the rotation as long as you want.
Agreed. I have it configured on a delay and with multiple file versions. I also have another pi running rsnapshot (rsync tool).
How’d you do that?
For the delay, I just reduce how often it checks for new files instead of instantaneously.
Edit the share, enable file versioning, choose which flavor.
There’s some really good options in this thread, just remember that whatever you pick. Unless you test your backups, they are as good as not existing.
How does one realistically test their backups, if they are doing the 3-2-1 backup plan?
I validate (or whatever the term used is) my backups, once a month, and trust that it means something 😰
Untill you test a backup it’s not complete, how you test it is up to you.
If you upload to a remote location, pull it down and unpack it. Check that you can open import files, if you can’t open it then the backup is not worth the dick space
Deploy the backup (or some part of it) to a test system. If it can boot or you can get the files back, they work.
Is there some good automated way of doing that? What would it look like, something that compares hashes?
That very much depends on your backup of choice, that’s also the point. How do you recover your backup?
Start with a manual recover a backup and unpack it, check import files open. Write down all the steps you did, how do you automate them.
NAS at the parents’ house. Restic nightly job, with some plumbing scripts to automate it sensibly.
This is mine exactly. Mine send to backblaze b2
I use syncthing to push data offsite encrypted and with staggered versioning, to a tiny ITX box I run at family member’s house
The best part about sync thing is that you can set it to untrusted at the target. The data all gets encrypted and is not accessible whatsoever and the other side.
This is exactly what I’m about to do (later this week when I visit their house)
I’ve been using syncthing for years, but any tips for the encryption?
I was going to use SendOnly at my end to ensure that the data at the other end is an exact mirror, but in that case, how would the restore work if it’s all encrypted?
I use borg backup. It, and another tool called restic, are meant for creating encrypted backups. Further, it can create backups regularly and only backup differences. This means you could take a daily backup without making new copies of your entire library. They also allow you to, as part of compressing and encrypting, make a backup to a remote machine over ssh. I think you should start with either of those.
One provider thats built for being a cloud backup is borgbase. It can be a location you backup a borg (or restic I think) repository. There are others that are made to be easily accessed with these backup tools.
Lastly, I’ll mention that borg handles making a backup, but doesn’t handle the scheduling. Borgmatic is another tool that, given a yml configuration file, will perform the borgbackup commands on a schedule with the defined arguments. You could also use something like systemd/cron to run a schedule.
Personally, I use borgbackup configured in NixOS (which makes the systemd units for making daily backups) and I back up to a different computer in my house and to borgbase. I have 3 copies, 1 cloud and 2 in my home.
Cloud is kind of the default these days but given you’re on this community, I’m guessing you want to keep third parties out of it.
Traditionally, at least in the video editing world, we would keep LTO or some other format offsite and pay for housing it or if you have multiple locations available to you just have those drives shipped back-and-forth as they are updated at regular intervals.
I don’t know what you really have access to or what you’re willing to compromise on so it’s kind of hard to answer the question to be honest. Lots of ways to do it
My dad and I each have Synology NAS. We do a hyper sync backup from one to the other. I back up to his and vice versa. I also use syncthing to backup my plex media so he can mount it locally on his plex server.
Put brand new drive into system, begin clone
When clone is done, pull drive out and place in a cardboard box
Take that box to my off-site storage (neighbors house) and bury it
(In truth I couldn’t afford to get to the 1 off-site in time and have potentially tragically lost almost 4TB of data that, while replacable, will take time because I don’t fucking remember what I even had lol. Gonna take the drives to a specialist tho cuz I think the plates are fine and it’s the actual reading mechanism that’s busted)
For this I use a python script run via cron to output an html directory file that lists all the folder contents and pushes it to my cloud storage. This way if I ever have a critical failure of replaceable media, I can just refer to my latest directory file.
I just rsync it once in a while to a home server running in my dad’s house. I want it done manually in a “pull” direction rather than a “push” in case I ever get hit with ransomware.
I used to say restic and b2; lately, the b2 part has become more iffy, because of scuttlebutt, but for now it’s still my offsite and will remain so until and unless the situation resolves unfavorably.
Restic is the core. It supports multiple cloud providers, making configuration and use trivial. It encrypts before sending, so the destination never has access to unencrypted blobs. It does incremental backups, and supports FUSE vfs mounting of backups, making accessing historical versions of individual files extremely easy. It’s OSS, and a single binary executable; IMHO it’s at the top of its class, commercial or OSS.
B2 has been very good to me, and is a clear winner for this is case: writes and space are pennies a month, and it only gets more expensive if you’re doing a lot of reads. The UI is straightforward and easy to use, the API is good; if it weren’t for their recent legal and financial drama, I’d still unreservedly recommend them. As it is, you’d have you evaluate it yourself.
