8 ms·

Incremental Backups Using GNU Tar and S3

133 points by cirowrc 9y ago

IgorPartola 9y ago
Note that one point of failure of this setup is that you are keeping the snapshot/index filed locally. Ideally, you want to back those up as well.
boramalper 9y ago
I'm not sure if tar is a good format for backups, due to its extremely sequential nature (e.g. you can't get a list of the files in an archive without scanning the whole archive...)
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  What overhead does that add in practice? Like a second or so to scan a few GB of tarball? Does that matter?
  - ctur 9y ago
    It often is, especially if the tarball is compressed (especially if you use anything but Zstandard) or on a network store rather than fast local ssd. Typically a rule of thumb is a hard drive with a spindle may five around 100mb/sec throughput, so that is likely the bigger bottleneck, followed by cpu if using slower compression algorithms. Zstandard at a high compression level gives a good tradeoff of decompression speed vs underlying physical throughput, be it network or spindle. Even so, yes, the sequential nature of tar is not great for this reason. Squashfs files, which can be used on Linux and Mac (using fuse for OS X), are a very good alternative for archIves, though without some of the features described in the linked article.
  - boramalper 9y ago
    I guess it can be cumbersome as well if there are many small* files (since you need to iterate over all of them) until you find the one you are looking for. Think of it like a linked list. *: As opposed to a few large files.
  - noselasd 9y ago
    you need to download the entire thing to scan it. if it already resides locally on a seekable media , there's litle drawback
- Crontab 9y ago
  This issue occurred to me as well (especially for encrypted tarballs). My workaround was to create a listing of the files that accompanies the tarball, such as: "backup.tar" and "backup.list".
ape4 9y ago
You'd definitely want to do a full backup occasionally.
- cirowrc 9y ago
  I totally agree!
bauerd 9y ago
Worth checking out for backups is git-annex with remote bup repositories: * https://github.com/bup/bup https://github.com/bup/bup * http://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/bup/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/bup/
- cirowrc 9y ago
  I didn't know about `bup`! Thanks for the reference! I was reading the README and it indeed looks pretty great. Have you been using it? What's your experience with it? The ability to recover from a left state seems pretty amazing: > You can back up directly to a remote bup server, without needing tons of temporary disk space on the computer being backed up. And if your backup is interrupted halfway through, the next run will pick up where you left off.
rasengan 9y ago
I would really recommend using duplicity[1]. It supports gpg, incremental backups and more. [1] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
- abrkn 9y ago
  Can anyone else vouch for this being a stable, long term solution for backing up my home directory from macOS? Every single backup/cloud file storage gives me anxiety that I did something wrong or that there are bugs not discovered by retrieving random archives as a test.
  - jopsen 9y ago
    From: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/features.html http://duplicity.nongnu.org/features.html > Although you should never have to look at a duplicity archive manually, if the need should arise they can be produced and processed using GnuPG, rdiff, and tar. I haven't set it up yet, but it's going to be my holiday project this Christmas..
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Similarly there’s the annoyingly named duplicati which also works pretty well. I have it set to send snapshots to google drive, encrypted of course.
- maturz 9y ago
  There is also Duplicati https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati
- 88e282102ae2e5b 9y ago
  Though anecdotal, the one time I tried to restore my data from a duplicity backup (aside from when I initially started using it), I got a stack trace with an unhandled KeyError. I was never able to find out why the error happened or how to fix it, but thankfully I was just testing my ability to restore. Anyway, I would recommend against using it - errors like that should be impossible when you're not doing anything exotic.
terrik 9y ago
A great, though non-free, backup tool that supports incremental encrypted backups is Arq[0]. Arq supports painless back ups to multiple cloud storage providers, with budget enforcements, etc. [0] https://www.arqbackup.com https://www.arqbackup.com
arca_vorago 9y ago
Tar works for small things, but over an arbitrary file number file size combo it becomes unwieldy. Rsync, rbackup, rsnapshot, are great tools based on rsync, and these days Borg has been getting a lot of traction. Bacula is great but complicated to setup and manage. There is a newer very interesting one called Ur that seems promising... And my mind is blanking on some of the others, I'll comment when I'm not mobile so I can look at my list. Also don't forget zfs/btrfs functions that might be relevant.
- blunte 9y ago
  I second Bacula as something to look into. The configuration does take some time to understand, but it is incredibly flexible. It's also industrial strength and reliable.
funkaster 9y ago
I used to have a "poor man's time machine" system based on rsync + hard links to files that didn't change with new backups. Essentially it was the same concept than time machine. Of course you couldn't upload a single "snapshot" because tar wouldn't know what's a hard link. One advantage of using rsync is that you can also keep track of things you delete. Today I'm using zfs with real snapshots. For systems with no zfs support (my wife's iMac for instance), I have a zfs fs that those systems rsync to, after the rsync is done I create a snapshot. All scripted. The snapshots can be stored in another server for an additional layer of backup, or incrementally send them to s3 if you want.
- svara 9y ago
  Cool setup. But if you're incrementally sending snapshots to a non-ZFS host (S3), your S3 storage will keep growing indefinitely, because you can't delete any snapshots from there ever, since they reference each other. Correct?
  - reificator 9y ago
    Seems like you could probably use a keyframe like approach to get a nice middle ground. Every month, or biweekly or so, take a full backup and base the snapshots on that.
- azag0 9y ago
  I was surprised how easy it is to setup a time-machine-like backup with rsync. I'm backing up every hour to my server, and a cron job prunes the backups every night. Disarmingly simple.
- Rotareti 9y ago
  > I used to have a "poor man's time machine" system based on rsync + hard links to files that didn't change with new backups. I build something similar, that runs on a Raspberry Pi and creates backups for the machines in my home network [0]. The Pi pings each machine every hour, if a machine is online and a backup is due, it starts a backup process. My Pi uses a USB battery as a UPS (unlimited power supply) [1]. I put all the hardware in a little medicine cabinet on the wall [1]. It's been running stable for month now, without a single reboot. It needs about 15 minutes to backup my dev machine over WiFi. It's a little independent backup module, I'm really happy with it. :) [0] https://github.com/feluxe/very-hungry-pi https://github.com/feluxe/very-hungry-pi [1] https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00FAU7ZB2/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00FAU7ZB2/ref=oh_aui_searc... [2] https://www.amazon.de/HMF-Medizinschrank-Arzneischrank-Hausapotheke-Original/dp/B002CVKEWY https://www.amazon.de/HMF-Medizinschrank-Arzneischrank-Hausa...
rsync 9y ago
If you're intrigued by using basic unix primitives for tasks like this you'd probably also be intrigued by a cloud storage product that was built to act like a unix primitive.[1][2] If you're interested in point-in-time snapshots, you're probably also intrigued by our ZFS platform that gives you day/week/month/quarter/year snapshots that you don't have to configure or maintain - you just do a "dumb" rsync (or whatever) to us and the snapshots just appear. If you're interested in encrypted backups you should look into the 'borg backup' tool which has become the de facto standard for remote, encrypted, changes-only-upload backups.[3][4] Finally, if S3 pricing is important, you should email us about our "HN Readers'" discount. [1] https://www.rsync.net https://www.rsync.net [2] Examples: http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html [3] https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ [4] http://rsync.net/products/attic.html http://rsync.net/products/attic.html
- turblety 9y ago
  Regarding rsync.net, I'm sorry but I won't trust any company to protect my data if they can't spend a few minutes to put an SSL certificate on their website. The rsync.net url just redirects to an http link with no SSL certificate.
  - ctdean 9y ago
    What's the threat model for serving a read-only, public, marketing site over http? Or is it just a general principle?
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Users are for example protected from ISP injecting ads or tracking in the website.
    - harshreality 9y ago
      That website is not a read-only, public marketing site. It contains their order page, which asks for personal information: https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html Their unencrypted pricing page links to that encrypted order form page. We all agree there should be no http to http transitions like that, right? If you'll note, that encrypted order page is on the same host as their unencrypted pages. Both rsync.net and www.rsync.net covered by the cert. They have SSL set up already, and they just purposely redirect away to http for their static pages. That is a well-known ssl antipattern.
loeg 9y ago
You can do much the same thing with less work using the Tarsnap tool and service. Rather than incremental backup, blocks are deduplicated on the client and only unique blocks are backed up. This has about the same storage efficiency as incremental backups, but has the benefit of not relying upon "full" backup plus incremental diffs to achieve the final snapshot contents. (I have no affiliation with Tarsnap other than Colin seems like a nice guy and I am a customer.) I have full backups configured every 12 hours. Just for example, on my last backup, the total logical size was 12 GB; the compressed size of the undeduplicated blocks was 7.2 GB; the total size of actual new data, uncompressed, was 181 MB; and the final sum uploaded for this new full backup was 72 MB. Logically, Tarsnap stores 2.9 TB of my backups, but after compression and deduplication the "physical" requirement is only 16 GB. For this I pay about 17¢ USD/day, or $62/year. I could probably try to lower my use storage use somewhat (the largest component of that cost, 13.4¢/day) but it hasn't been worth my time yet.
- raphinou 9y ago
  Tarsnap is really slow to restore big files. Just saying in the hope it can help some people.
  - mey 9y ago
    It's slow to restore smaller files as well. It is certainly not near-line disaster recovery. Conversely, it has already saved my bacon a few times and I trust it's design.
  - Scaevolus 9y ago
    As a tar-based backup system without a separate index, restoring a single file is approximately as expensive as restoring the entire backup. Systems that split metadata and data streams do a lot better (restic, attic, borg, bup).
    - cperciva 9y ago
      Err... Tarsnap does split metadata and data.
muxator 9y ago
With Btrfs or ZFS the whole concept of incremental backup is reshuffled: basically you have consistent full backups, only occupying the space of a full backup + all the diffs, and you only transfer the changed blocks. It's really something with no comparison to other methods. While I love ZFS, let's not forget that btrfs has its strengths (a lot more flexibility, mainline support), and, provided that your use case is single disk, Raid 1 or raid 10, has been working super reliably for some years now.
magnetic 9y ago
If you have a large amount of data to backup, cloud storage may be too expensive. My data set is about 8 TB (my wife is a professional photographer), and it would be too expensive to keep in S3, so I have an "offsite backup system" that is hosted at my in-laws. It's just a RaspberryPi + an 8 TB drive encrypted with LUKS (in case it gets stolen or tampered with). Every night, the RPi syncs the data from my house with rsnapshot (which is a TimeMachine like tool that uses hard links with rsync over ssh). Because of how rsnapshot works, I can always go there and look for a file in one of the directories: it looks just like the original hierarchy, and I can just browse the filesystem as I would on the original system. I also don't have to "trust a 3rd party" that the data is really there. I remember some posts on HN about people who used some backup services successfully... until restore time. I'm always cautious about the magical "set it and forget it" service that is a black box. The first sync has to be done "on the premises" because of the sheer amount of data to transfer, but then the few daily Gigs of data can easily go over the net while everyone is sleeping.
- icebraining 9y ago
  S3 is expensive not just because it's "cloud", but because it keeps multiplies copies in monitored drives, whereas your single drive is a ticking time bomb. I have a couple of drives in RAID 1 (mirror), yet I still don't rely on it exclusively for really important data.
  - jjnoakes 9y ago
    He doesn't just have a single drive though, he has (at least) two (the drive in active use and the off-site backup drive). Not the ideal 3-2-1 rule of thumb, but also not a ticking time bomb.
  - magnetic 9y ago
    Well, all of my data exists in 3 copies. One in my house, one in the detached "granny unit", and one in the offsite location that I described. My single offsite drive is indeed a ticking time bomb, but it's easily replaceable with no loss of data when it dies. The problematic case is when all the drives hosting the 3 copies happen to die at the same time. Perhaps I don't have good protection about this case, but I think I've reached diminished returns in terms of backups.
aedocw 9y ago
I recently wanted to get backups going in a similar way (incremental with copies on-site and off-site). I ended up using Borg and rclone, sending the backups to s3 compatible Wasabi storage. It's been working great, and coupled with zerotier on machines that are not in the house (family members), I ended up with a pretty resilient system that only costs a few dollars per month. I wrote up the details here: https://localconspiracy.com/2017/10/backup-everything.html https://localconspiracy.com/2017/10/backup-everything.html
atomi 9y ago
I use restic to minio stored on a raid1 btrfs system and I love it.

133 points by cirowrc 9y ago

Note that one point of failure of this setup is that you are keeping the snapshot/index filed locally. Ideally, you want to back those up as well.

boramalper 9y ago

I'm not sure if tar is a good format for backups, due to its extremely sequential nature (e.g. you can't get a list of the files in an archive without scanning the whole archive...)

chrisseaton 9y ago
What overhead does that add in practice? Like a second or so to scan a few GB of tarball? Does that matter?
- ctur 9y ago
  It often is, especially if the tarball is compressed (especially if you use anything but Zstandard) or on a network store rather than fast local ssd. Typically a rule of thumb is a hard drive with a spindle may five around 100mb/sec throughput, so that is likely the bigger bottleneck, followed by cpu if using slower compression algorithms. Zstandard at a high compression level gives a good tradeoff of decompression speed vs underlying physical throughput, be it network or spindle. Even so, yes, the sequential nature of tar is not great for this reason. Squashfs files, which can be used on Linux and Mac (using fuse for OS X), are a very good alternative for archIves, though without some of the features described in the linked article.
- boramalper 9y ago
  I guess it can be cumbersome as well if there are many small* files (since you need to iterate over all of them) until you find the one you are looking for. Think of it like a linked list. *: As opposed to a few large files.
- noselasd 9y ago
  you need to download the entire thing to scan it. if it already resides locally on a seekable media , there's litle drawback
Crontab 9y ago
This issue occurred to me as well (especially for encrypted tarballs). My workaround was to create a listing of the files that accompanies the tarball, such as: "backup.tar" and "backup.list".

ape4 9y ago

You'd definitely want to do a full backup occasionally.

cirowrc 9y ago
I totally agree!

bauerd 9y ago

Worth checking out for backups is git-annex with remote bup repositories: * https://github.com/bup/bup https://github.com/bup/bup * http://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/bup/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/bup/

cirowrc 9y ago
I didn't know about `bup`! Thanks for the reference! I was reading the README and it indeed looks pretty great. Have you been using it? What's your experience with it? The ability to recover from a left state seems pretty amazing: > You can back up directly to a remote bup server, without needing tons of temporary disk space on the computer being backed up. And if your backup is interrupted halfway through, the next run will pick up where you left off.

rasengan 9y ago

I would really recommend using duplicity[1]. It supports gpg, incremental backups and more. [1] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

abrkn 9y ago
Can anyone else vouch for this being a stable, long term solution for backing up my home directory from macOS? Every single backup/cloud file storage gives me anxiety that I did something wrong or that there are bugs not discovered by retrieving random archives as a test.
- jopsen 9y ago
  From: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/features.html http://duplicity.nongnu.org/features.html > Although you should never have to look at a duplicity archive manually, if the need should arise they can be produced and processed using GnuPG, rdiff, and tar. I haven't set it up yet, but it's going to be my holiday project this Christmas..
dawnerd 9y ago
Similarly there’s the annoyingly named duplicati which also works pretty well. I have it set to send snapshots to google drive, encrypted of course.
maturz 9y ago
There is also Duplicati https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati
88e282102ae2e5b 9y ago
Though anecdotal, the one time I tried to restore my data from a duplicity backup (aside from when I initially started using it), I got a stack trace with an unhandled KeyError. I was never able to find out why the error happened or how to fix it, but thankfully I was just testing my ability to restore. Anyway, I would recommend against using it - errors like that should be impossible when you're not doing anything exotic.

terrik 9y ago

A great, though non-free, backup tool that supports incremental encrypted backups is Arq[0]. Arq supports painless back ups to multiple cloud storage providers, with budget enforcements, etc. [0] https://www.arqbackup.com https://www.arqbackup.com

arca_vorago 9y ago

Tar works for small things, but over an arbitrary file number file size combo it becomes unwieldy. Rsync, rbackup, rsnapshot, are great tools based on rsync, and these days Borg has been getting a lot of traction. Bacula is great but complicated to setup and manage. There is a newer very interesting one called Ur that seems promising... And my mind is blanking on some of the others, I'll comment when I'm not mobile so I can look at my list. Also don't forget zfs/btrfs functions that might be relevant.

blunte 9y ago
I second Bacula as something to look into. The configuration does take some time to understand, but it is incredibly flexible. It's also industrial strength and reliable.

funkaster 9y ago

I used to have a "poor man's time machine" system based on rsync + hard links to files that didn't change with new backups. Essentially it was the same concept than time machine. Of course you couldn't upload a single "snapshot" because tar wouldn't know what's a hard link. One advantage of using rsync is that you can also keep track of things you delete. Today I'm using zfs with real snapshots. For systems with no zfs support (my wife's iMac for instance), I have a zfs fs that those systems rsync to, after the rsync is done I create a snapshot. All scripted. The snapshots can be stored in another server for an additional layer of backup, or incrementally send them to s3 if you want.

svara 9y ago
Cool setup. But if you're incrementally sending snapshots to a non-ZFS host (S3), your S3 storage will keep growing indefinitely, because you can't delete any snapshots from there ever, since they reference each other. Correct?
- reificator 9y ago
  Seems like you could probably use a keyframe like approach to get a nice middle ground. Every month, or biweekly or so, take a full backup and base the snapshots on that.
azag0 9y ago
I was surprised how easy it is to setup a time-machine-like backup with rsync. I'm backing up every hour to my server, and a cron job prunes the backups every night. Disarmingly simple.
Rotareti 9y ago
> I used to have a "poor man's time machine" system based on rsync + hard links to files that didn't change with new backups. I build something similar, that runs on a Raspberry Pi and creates backups for the machines in my home network [0]. The Pi pings each machine every hour, if a machine is online and a backup is due, it starts a backup process. My Pi uses a USB battery as a UPS (unlimited power supply) [1]. I put all the hardware in a little medicine cabinet on the wall [1]. It's been running stable for month now, without a single reboot. It needs about 15 minutes to backup my dev machine over WiFi. It's a little independent backup module, I'm really happy with it. :) [0] https://github.com/feluxe/very-hungry-pi https://github.com/feluxe/very-hungry-pi [1] https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00FAU7ZB2/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00FAU7ZB2/ref=oh_aui_searc... [2] https://www.amazon.de/HMF-Medizinschrank-Arzneischrank-Hausapotheke-Original/dp/B002CVKEWY https://www.amazon.de/HMF-Medizinschrank-Arzneischrank-Hausa...

rsync 9y ago

If you're intrigued by using basic unix primitives for tasks like this you'd probably also be intrigued by a cloud storage product that was built to act like a unix primitive.[1][2] If you're interested in point-in-time snapshots, you're probably also intrigued by our ZFS platform that gives you day/week/month/quarter/year snapshots that you don't have to configure or maintain - you just do a "dumb" rsync (or whatever) to us and the snapshots just appear. If you're interested in encrypted backups you should look into the 'borg backup' tool which has become the de facto standard for remote, encrypted, changes-only-upload backups.[3][4] Finally, if S3 pricing is important, you should email us about our "HN Readers'" discount. [1] https://www.rsync.net https://www.rsync.net [2] Examples: http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html [3] https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ [4] http://rsync.net/products/attic.html http://rsync.net/products/attic.html

turblety 9y ago
Regarding rsync.net, I'm sorry but I won't trust any company to protect my data if they can't spend a few minutes to put an SSL certificate on their website. The rsync.net url just redirects to an http link with no SSL certificate.
- ctdean 9y ago
  What's the threat model for serving a read-only, public, marketing site over http? Or is it just a general principle?
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Users are for example protected from ISP injecting ads or tracking in the website.
  - harshreality 9y ago
    That website is not a read-only, public marketing site. It contains their order page, which asks for personal information: https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html Their unencrypted pricing page links to that encrypted order form page. We all agree there should be no http to http transitions like that, right? If you'll note, that encrypted order page is on the same host as their unencrypted pages. Both rsync.net and www.rsync.net covered by the cert. They have SSL set up already, and they just purposely redirect away to http for their static pages. That is a well-known ssl antipattern.

loeg 9y ago

You can do much the same thing with less work using the Tarsnap tool and service. Rather than incremental backup, blocks are deduplicated on the client and only unique blocks are backed up. This has about the same storage efficiency as incremental backups, but has the benefit of not relying upon "full" backup plus incremental diffs to achieve the final snapshot contents. (I have no affiliation with Tarsnap other than Colin seems like a nice guy and I am a customer.) I have full backups configured every 12 hours. Just for example, on my last backup, the total logical size was 12 GB; the compressed size of the undeduplicated blocks was 7.2 GB; the total size of actual new data, uncompressed, was 181 MB; and the final sum uploaded for this new full backup was 72 MB. Logically, Tarsnap stores 2.9 TB of my backups, but after compression and deduplication the "physical" requirement is only 16 GB. For this I pay about 17¢ USD/day, or $62/year. I could probably try to lower my use storage use somewhat (the largest component of that cost, 13.4¢/day) but it hasn't been worth my time yet.

raphinou 9y ago
Tarsnap is really slow to restore big files. Just saying in the hope it can help some people.
- mey 9y ago
  It's slow to restore smaller files as well. It is certainly not near-line disaster recovery. Conversely, it has already saved my bacon a few times and I trust it's design.
- Scaevolus 9y ago
  As a tar-based backup system without a separate index, restoring a single file is approximately as expensive as restoring the entire backup. Systems that split metadata and data streams do a lot better (restic, attic, borg, bup).
  - cperciva 9y ago
    Err... Tarsnap does split metadata and data.

muxator 9y ago

With Btrfs or ZFS the whole concept of incremental backup is reshuffled: basically you have consistent full backups, only occupying the space of a full backup + all the diffs, and you only transfer the changed blocks. It's really something with no comparison to other methods. While I love ZFS, let's not forget that btrfs has its strengths (a lot more flexibility, mainline support), and, provided that your use case is single disk, Raid 1 or raid 10, has been working super reliably for some years now.

magnetic 9y ago

If you have a large amount of data to backup, cloud storage may be too expensive. My data set is about 8 TB (my wife is a professional photographer), and it would be too expensive to keep in S3, so I have an "offsite backup system" that is hosted at my in-laws. It's just a RaspberryPi + an 8 TB drive encrypted with LUKS (in case it gets stolen or tampered with). Every night, the RPi syncs the data from my house with rsnapshot (which is a TimeMachine like tool that uses hard links with rsync over ssh). Because of how rsnapshot works, I can always go there and look for a file in one of the directories: it looks just like the original hierarchy, and I can just browse the filesystem as I would on the original system. I also don't have to "trust a 3rd party" that the data is really there. I remember some posts on HN about people who used some backup services successfully... until restore time. I'm always cautious about the magical "set it and forget it" service that is a black box. The first sync has to be done "on the premises" because of the sheer amount of data to transfer, but then the few daily Gigs of data can easily go over the net while everyone is sleeping.

icebraining 9y ago
S3 is expensive not just because it's "cloud", but because it keeps multiplies copies in monitored drives, whereas your single drive is a ticking time bomb. I have a couple of drives in RAID 1 (mirror), yet I still don't rely on it exclusively for really important data.
- jjnoakes 9y ago
  He doesn't just have a single drive though, he has (at least) two (the drive in active use and the off-site backup drive). Not the ideal 3-2-1 rule of thumb, but also not a ticking time bomb.
- magnetic 9y ago
  Well, all of my data exists in 3 copies. One in my house, one in the detached "granny unit", and one in the offsite location that I described. My single offsite drive is indeed a ticking time bomb, but it's easily replaceable with no loss of data when it dies. The problematic case is when all the drives hosting the 3 copies happen to die at the same time. Perhaps I don't have good protection about this case, but I think I've reached diminished returns in terms of backups.

aedocw 9y ago

I recently wanted to get backups going in a similar way (incremental with copies on-site and off-site). I ended up using Borg and rclone, sending the backups to s3 compatible Wasabi storage. It's been working great, and coupled with zerotier on machines that are not in the house (family members), I ended up with a pretty resilient system that only costs a few dollars per month. I wrote up the details here: https://localconspiracy.com/2017/10/backup-everything.html https://localconspiracy.com/2017/10/backup-everything.html

atomi 9y ago

I use restic to minio stored on a raid1 btrfs system and I love it.