Why not use $60 you're paying per year for 1Tb of online storage to buy a 2Tb hard drive and use it for the backup?
Cheap and easy: buy a 2 TB drive and keep it at home. If some disaster affects your home -- flood, fire, burglary -- it can take out your data and its backup.
Cheap and reliable: buy a 2 TB hard drive and keep it somewhere else. Keeping the backup up-to-date means regularly bringing the drove home, updating it, and putting it back.
Easy and reliable: pay for a service like Backblaze that automatically backs up all your files to a remote server.
There are other benefits to services like B2 especially, namely being able to access your backed-up files from any device or location, or being able to link people to your files on a high-speed server.
You put the 2 TB drive somewhere else (at a relative's) and keep it updated regularly via network.
That's my set up (but with a bigger drive).
At home, I have the master copy of the data on my file server. Then I have backup #1 that is in the same location and backup #2 that is in a different location.
Both #1 and #2 get updated at night with a "timemachine-like" backup system based on rsnapshot. The network traffic goes over ssh.
Remote backup system #2 cost a UPS, a RaspberryPi and an 8 TB drive, which is about ~$250-$300 total.
The initial sync is best done locally of course, but deltas can generally easily go over network at night.
Cheap, reliable, and (relatively) easy (if you're a geek, that is).
The name escapes me right now, but basically you had to add "friends" in the software, then dedicate a certain amount of HDD space to it. It would then back up your files to your friends' computers, and theirs to yours. Backups were encrypted so your friends wouldn't be able to see your files.
It was a super neat idea, I wish I could remember what it was called so I could see if they're still around...
I'm looking into using the incremental diff/snapshot feature of btrfs to implement a more efficient solution :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Replicated_Block_D...
Both use rsync-style deltas to only send changes, but they use a content-addressable scheme like git so renames are a small metadata change record.
Also, both offer ftp and fuse interfaces if you need to access an older backup.
> Why not use $60 you're paying per year for 1Tb of online storage to buy a 2Tb hard drive and use it for the backup?
We HIGHLY recommend both. There is a philosophy called the 3-2-1 philosophy of backups. You should always have three copies of the data, two onsite, and one remote. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
Local backup is cheap and fast, and you should do it too. But it doesn't provide geographic redundancy.
It is proven that if you introduce friction into process, over time that process will be followed less.
But realistically, isn’t it worth $60 a year to have a constantly backed up hard drive? The alternative is to take the hard drive out of the safe every so often and do a backup and put it back.
Your point is valid and constant, seamless backup is indeed a good thing to have. Whether it's worth $60/year is one's own decision.
Care to share what kind of procedures you use?
I've recovered some data for friends and employers who want it back but aren't prepared to pay > USD1000 for it but if I cannot connect to the disk I'm lost.
(My tricks: tilting the disk, freezing the disk, leaving ssds powered on but sata unconnected, and even before that photorec and ddrescue etc.)
Note: don't do any of the above if data needs to be recovered at any cost, in that case just contact a data recovery company.
Modern higher density drives are probably less resilient, and who knows how flash drives will fair after 17 years in the closet - but my experience so far is that HDDs trump backup tapes on every measure including costs except at extreme sizes (at this point in time, into the petabytes).
A B2 based backup solution costs more but you don’t have those limitations.
[1] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666628-What-...
If you have an externally attached drive on your computer and it isn’t connected in 30 days and your computer is online, they erase that backup of the external drive.
If you reconnect your computer after a month and you don’t have the external drive connected, they erase your backup.
I perform hourly backups of my VPS and personal computers, storing it all into a giant repo on OVH and B2. If my house goes up in flames, I have to redo, at worst, 1 hour of work.
Additionally I won't have to deal with expanding to a 4TB drive eventually.
WRT your other comment: Yes, there's some small level of incremental security risk but there's so little that's genuinely sensitive in my storage, I'm willing to take that risk. And, yes, it's probably overkill but for the cost, there are a lot of things I spend money on that are probably unnecessary :-)
> I do onsite backups using Time Machine, and also Backblaze.
You are doing everything correctly. You are following the 3-2-1 backup philosophy, which is: "3 copies of the data, 2 copies locally, 1 copy remote". Here is a blog post we wrote about it: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/