I’m trying to plan a better backup solution for my home server. Right now I’m using Duplicati to back up my 3 external drives, but the backup is staying on-site and on the same kind of media as the original. So, what does your backup setup and workflow look like? Discs at a friend’s house? Cloud backup at a commercial provider? Magnetic tape in an underground bunker?
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I rawdog storage. I RAID0 and forget. huehue.
Toss in another drive for RAID5. That way you can at least have some redundancy…
It’s not important data. Why would I spend another $200+ for another 20TB drive to have redundancy for 1 and 0 I don’t care about…
“3! 2! 1!” Is just what I say when doing some potentially deleterious action after rsyincing a few key directories to a separate volume
I’ve a nightly cronjob that runs backup using rsync for my local, and an external HDD that I stash in my work locker that I bring home once a week or so to connect to the server, run a backup script (more rsync), then take it back to work. It’s not super sophisticated, but it works, and I have tested and restored from both the local and offsite backups.
3 sticky notes telling me to “go get that incremental backup working”,
2 separate external hard drives,
1 month out of dateSame lol. Can’t be that catastrophic. Right? …. Right?
I dump data to someone who probably practices 3-2-1 rule after encrypting it (which is Backblaze for me). I mean, these guys back up data for a living.
I use Kopia to B2, then on a monthly basis I copy the current Kopia repo to an external drive that’s otherwise kept offline in my house.
Sometimes: a laughing hyena.
If you don’t have tested backups, you don’t have a backup.
my backup is staring longingly at LTO drives and wishing they would magically be affordable.
My main server is backed up via Kopia to a 5 TB Hetzner Storage Box and to a second server at my parents in law‘s place. I‘ve got additional MDisc backups of old photos, Paperless PDFs and work related files that don‘t change at my mother‘s place as well.
My Linux ISO collection is too big to actually back up. So, I regularly create file lists and in the event of data loss, I will have to spend quite some time to rebuild it. At least, my fiber connection will help me with that.
- Primary ZFS pool with automatic snapshots
- Provides 3+ copies of the files via snapshots (3)
- Secondary ZFS pool at a different location replicates the primary
- Provides more copies of the files (3)
- Provides second media (2)
- Is off-site (1)
Does this make sense?
I don’t think this meets the definition of 3-2-1. Which isn’t a problem if it meets your requirements. Hell, I do something similar for my stuff. I have my primary NAS backed up to a secondary NAS. Both have BTRFS snapshots enabled, but the secondary has a longer retention period for snapshots. (One month vs one week). Then I have my secondary NAS mirrored to a NAS at my friends house for an offsite backup.
This is more of a 4-1-1 format.
But 3-2-1 is supposed to be:
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Three total copies of the data. Snapshots don’t count here, but the live data does.
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On two different types of media. I.e. one backup on HDD and another on optical media or tape.
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With at least one backup stored off site.
Hm I wonder why snapshots wouldn’t satisfy 3. Copies on the same disk like /file, /backup1/file, /backup2/file should satisfy 3. Why wouldn’t snapshots be equivalent if 3 doesn’t guard against filesystem or hardware failure? Just thinking and curious to see opinion.
If I’m reading your example right, I don’t think that would satisfy three either. Three copies of the data on the same filesystem or even the same system doesn’t satisfy the “three backups” rule. Because the only thing you’re really protecting against is maybe user error. I.e. accidental deletion or modification. You’re not protecting against filesystem corruption or system failure.
For a (little bit hyperbolic) example, if you put the system that has your live data on it through a wood chipper, could you use one of the other copies to recover your critical data? If yes, it counts. If no, it doesn’t.
Snapshots have the same issue, because at the root a snapshot is just an additional copy of the data. There’s additional automation, deduplication, and other features baked into the snapshot process but it’s basically just a fancy copy function.
Edit: all of the above is also why the saying “RAID is not a backup” holds true.
I’ve always understood 2 as 2 physically different media - i.e., copies in different folders or partitions of the same disk is not enough to protect against failure of that disk, but a copy on a different disk does. Ideally 2 physically different systems, so failure/fire in the primary system won’t corrupt/damage the backup.
Used to be that HDDs were expensive and using them as backup media would have been economically crazy, so most systems evolved backup media to be slower and cheaper. The main thing is that having /home/user/critical, /home/user/critical-backup, and /home/user/critical-backup2 satisfies 3 copies, but not 2 media.
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- Primary ZFS pool with automatic snapshots
My nas is a second copy of all my data, nothing only exists on the nas. The nas is also is slowly uploading to backblaze, data limits are slowing my progress. My photos which I feel are the least replaceable are automatically backed up to my nas , Google photos, and amazon photos, with manual backup to my desktop, and manual backup to an external hard drive that is stored in a fire resistant box.
I use Backblaze B2 for one offsite backup in “the cloud” and have two local HDDs. Using restic with rclone as storage interface, the whole thing is pretty easy.
A cronjob makes daily backups to B2, and once per month I copy the most current snapshot from B2 to my two local HDDs.
I have one planned improvement: Since my server needs programmatic access to B2, malware on it could wipe both the server and B2, leaving me with the potentially one-month old local backups. Therefore I want to run a Raspberry Pi at my parents’ place that mirrors the B2 repository daily but is basically air-gapped from the server. Should the B2 repository be wiped, the Raspberry Pi would still retain its snapshots.
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4-2-1-1 for me I guess 🫣 or 4-2-2?
Two copies at home, synced daily, one of them in an external drive that I like to refer as the emergency grab and run copy lol
One at a family member synced weekly and manually every time I visit.
All of those three copies are always within a 10 kilometer radius in a valley overseen by a volcano so…
One partial copy of the so-critical-would-cry-if-Iost data is synced every few days to a backblaze bucket.
Atm main sys is a ZFS RAIDZ1 on 3 SSDs
Weekly-ish backup onto 1TB external HDD.
Sync encrypted important stuff to Cloud.
Syncthing some stuff to smartphone.
