The downside of tarsnap is that once you lose your key, you lose your backups. For some cases such strong crypto is warranted, but for family pictures? I’m not so sure, at least not for me personally.
I say that as someone who lost access to his backups after I lost access to my backups shortly after both my machines where I had the passphrase stored were lost. There’s been a bunch of stories like this with strong encryption, people have three copies of their keys/passphrases and still manage to lose access.
Backblaze B2 is an excellent, reliable, widely-supported, and relatively cheap option for blob backup storage. Works with tools like arq (OSX, Windows), restic (Linux), rclone, etc.
Usually your best bet is to store your personal data in some sort of NAS or attached storage and then mirror to something like B2 off-site, perhaps with encryption for extra peace of mind.
I personally find that using rclone with Backblaze B2 is the best for performance and ease.
With rclone, you can easily saturate your network uplink and you can do partial/incremental uploads with minimal fuss. You can also configure it to not use you full uplink straightforwardly, to spare the bandwidth for your other home uses.
Mostly Google Drive and iCloud. And I set up the same for the family members (when they make me). Mostly because a lot of things to back up these days comes from the phones and they’re connected already, so it’s the least-effort thing.
I keep wanting to setup something local, but then get lost in planning. It starts with a “just a raspberry with a USB drive”, then we add this and that and I end up with a server rack idea, so I just drop it. In the mean time, Insync keeps chugging along and baking up my stuff.
^ I second this. Backed multiple computers using Arq + Google Drive + Random Storage to BackBlaze . Synology CloudSync makes it really easy to pull from and backup to a large number of cloud providers.
I have a desktop system running HardenedBSD with a few disks in a ZFS RAID-Z1. I’ll use scp, sftp, rsync, or filezilla, depending on which client system I’m on (my laptops run HardenedBSD, my wife’s runs Ubuntu).
I use a selfhosted instance of Nextcloud, but I’m still looking out for a better solution. Photos on iOS get uploaded to the Nextcloud instance, however, it’s not the same as if they were uploaded to iCloud — I still have to delete photos on my phone to clear up memory. Also, the photo viewer leaves a lot to be desired…
For “general stuff storage” I use Dropbox with a Plus account. (2TB is overkill for my usage but the free account was insufficient.) For documents where I might need to collaborate or easily share things, mostly Google Drive. Actually sensitive documents are worked on locally and encrypted before being placed in one or the other cloud service, currently with GPG but I’m hoping to find a better solution at some point.
For backups I use Backblaze, and I also have a local backup drive for my primary computer. With Dropbox and Google Drive synced to the same computer, this makes approximately everything is backed up locally and with at least two storage providers, which feels like the right level of redundancy for most things.
While in principle I’d love to self-host the remote storage components, I have enough at-scale storage experience to know that it’s a hard problem to solve with lots of edge cases and unexpected issues. So in practice I’m much happier to outsource data integrity to the teams at Google, Dropbox, and Backblaze, who are unlikely to collectively lose my data all at the same time.
I was storing every family photo, but I have started just archiving the weekly roundup we show the extended family; it’s got the best pictures, and the text adds context for when I come back to read it.
I’m iOS only now, so I use a combination of iCloud Photos (cloud) and Moments on my Synology (local) - the latter’s synced photos are also backed up to an external USB drive.
I have a prohibitively slow internet connection and didn’t bother to build a nas yet so I just do incremental backups to an external hdd once in a while.
Not having daily backups isn’t really a problem since
Important data is on fairly reliable mediums with pre-failure alerts
I usually don’t really have much newly created important data except
projects: I just push regularly to a git remote
newly-taken photos: I do not delete them from memory cards until the next backup is complete
pCloud life-time subscription which I bought a couple of years ago instead of a NAS, so I’ve recovered the money by now. pCloud is OK, but not as solid as Dropbox (it’s still improving though!).
The pCloud is fully synced to several machines, so that’s my recovery mechanism.
A combination. For backups, I use Backblaze (along with Time Machine – we’re a Mac family). For hosting, iCloud. I’ve tried to switch to, say, 500px or SmugMug, but the friction there is too high.
For family documents, I put most of them in 1Password.
I currently use NextCloud (self hosted), with offsite backups using tarsnap.
The downside of tarsnap is that once you lose your key, you lose your backups. For some cases such strong crypto is warranted, but for family pictures? I’m not so sure, at least not for me personally.
I say that as someone who lost access to his backups after I lost access to my backups shortly after both my machines where I had the passphrase stored were lost. There’s been a bunch of stories like this with strong encryption, people have three copies of their keys/passphrases and still manage to lose access.
Just something to keep in mind.
Yeah, that is something to keep in mind. I’ve backed up my key (converted to QR, printed, laminated, and stored in a separate secure location).
I see I’m just scared to host it my self just scared about the security since I’ll be hosting family pictures
Syncthing that’s also on a nas of mine which gets backed up.
Also backblaze in some places.
How is Syncthing’s performance for large number of files? Does it compared to that of Dropbox?
Never had it perform poorly enough to care… take from that what you will.
I love this attitude :) Comes from the seasoned veterans who have better things to do :)
Backblaze B2 is an excellent, reliable, widely-supported, and relatively cheap option for blob backup storage. Works with tools like arq (OSX, Windows), restic (Linux), rclone, etc.
Usually your best bet is to store your personal data in some sort of NAS or attached storage and then mirror to something like B2 off-site, perhaps with encryption for extra peace of mind.
I personally find that using rclone with Backblaze B2 is the best for performance and ease.
https://rclone.org/b2/
With rclone, you can easily saturate your network uplink and you can do partial/incremental uploads with minimal fuss. You can also configure it to not use you full uplink straightforwardly, to spare the bandwidth for your other home uses.
https://rclone.org/docs/#bwlimit-bandwidth-spec
I’ll check out blackblaze B2 Btw what’s the difference between there personal storage and b2 I’m just can’t buy nas at the moment
Covered in their help docs here: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218483787-What-s-the-difference-between-B2-vs-Backblaze-Online-Backup
Mostly Google Drive and iCloud. And I set up the same for the family members (when they make me). Mostly because a lot of things to back up these days comes from the phones and they’re connected already, so it’s the least-effort thing.
I keep wanting to setup something local, but then get lost in planning. It starts with a “just a raspberry with a USB drive”, then we add this and that and I end up with a server rack idea, so I just drop it. In the mean time, Insync keeps chugging along and baking up my stuff.
Pictures: Auto upload from phone to Dropbox, Google Photos and iCloud. Upload from SD card manually (I don’t do this often).
Synced to a ‘proper’ computer using Dropbox and backed up from there to Backblaze in case of corruption / accidental deletion etc.
iCloud want to build something that moves me to wasabi or S3-ish platform
iCloud. I pay for a server and backups or pay someone else.
I have a synology NAS and am quite happy with it. Nightly backups off-site
^ I second this. Backed multiple computers using Arq + Google Drive + Random Storage to BackBlaze . Synology CloudSync makes it really easy to pull from and backup to a large number of cloud providers.
I have a desktop system running HardenedBSD with a few disks in a ZFS RAID-Z1. I’ll use scp, sftp, rsync, or filezilla, depending on which client system I’m on (my laptops run HardenedBSD, my wife’s runs Ubuntu).
I use a selfhosted instance of Nextcloud, but I’m still looking out for a better solution. Photos on iOS get uploaded to the Nextcloud instance, however, it’s not the same as if they were uploaded to iCloud — I still have to delete photos on my phone to clear up memory. Also, the photo viewer leaves a lot to be desired…
For “general stuff storage” I use Dropbox with a Plus account. (2TB is overkill for my usage but the free account was insufficient.) For documents where I might need to collaborate or easily share things, mostly Google Drive. Actually sensitive documents are worked on locally and encrypted before being placed in one or the other cloud service, currently with GPG but I’m hoping to find a better solution at some point.
For backups I use Backblaze, and I also have a local backup drive for my primary computer. With Dropbox and Google Drive synced to the same computer, this makes approximately everything is backed up locally and with at least two storage providers, which feels like the right level of redundancy for most things.
While in principle I’d love to self-host the remote storage components, I have enough at-scale storage experience to know that it’s a hard problem to solve with lots of edge cases and unexpected issues. So in practice I’m much happier to outsource data integrity to the teams at Google, Dropbox, and Backblaze, who are unlikely to collectively lose my data all at the same time.
I just keep buying physical storage.
Damnn i see I just. Can’t buy physical storage at the moment
I have a NAS (freenas).
I was storing every family photo, but I have started just archiving the weekly roundup we show the extended family; it’s got the best pictures, and the text adds context for when I come back to read it.
Just curious guys How’s your experience has been with blackblaze I’m leaning towards that
All I really store is photos. Though the tarsnap backups include a bit more they are still 90% photos.
I’m iOS only now, so I use a combination of iCloud Photos (cloud) and Moments on my Synology (local) - the latter’s synced photos are also backed up to an external USB drive.
I can highly recommend Arq and Wasabi. Very cost effective.
local NAS (Samba/NFS share), nightly backup to own server, irregular backup to external hard disks that are stored with others.
I have a prohibitively slow internet connection and didn’t bother to build a nas yet so I just do incremental backups to an external hdd once in a while.
Not having daily backups isn’t really a problem since
pCloud life-time subscription which I bought a couple of years ago instead of a NAS, so I’ve recovered the money by now. pCloud is OK, but not as solid as Dropbox (it’s still improving though!).
The pCloud is fully synced to several machines, so that’s my recovery mechanism.
Interesting. Never heard of them before. Thanks for sharing!
A combination. For backups, I use Backblaze (along with Time Machine – we’re a Mac family). For hosting, iCloud. I’ve tried to switch to, say, 500px or SmugMug, but the friction there is too high.
For family documents, I put most of them in 1Password.