I have scripts to do two things: 1. Use rsync to backup everything to a Synology NAS every day 2. Backup from the NAS to tarsnap (cloud service with cheap, en

I have scripts to do two things: 1. Use rsync to backup everything to a Synology NAS every day 2. Backup from the NAS to tarsnap (cloud service with cheap, encrypted backups) every few weeks. Theres only a few important ideas and a whole lot of ways to accomplish them: 1. Backup frequency and retention policies. I forgot the term for this, but you want something that prioritizes more frequent backups for nearer term data. For example, see the Apple Time Machine backup policy: "hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month until the volume runs out of space" 2. Don't micro optimize decisions like which hard drive is most reliable. It's a waste of time and ultimately any drive can fail, the filesystem on that drive can fail etc. Instead, use backups. RAID gives you disk-level redundancy, and an extra backup on the cloud will almost never fail because they have pros making sure of that. 3. A backup you haven't tested restoring from is NOT a backup.