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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

If you’re tech savvy and want the easy answer then check out Tarsnap[1].

If you’re tech savvy and want to save a few bucks by doing it yourself, check out borg[2]. You’ll need to set up an external server for it but at scale (TB) it’s an order of magnitude cheaper than Tarsnap.

Regardless of off site storage I’d suggest also buying two large USB drives and formatting them with LUKS. Keep them offline and only sync them occasionally as live storage isn’t really a backup.

If you’re not tech savvy I’m convinced what you’re asking for is impossible. The best a layman can do is pick a reputable provider (like the ones you’ve listed).

[1]: https://www.tarsnap.com

[2]: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

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Tarsnap is a third-party service which in turn depends on S3. The author specifically requested solutions which do not depend on a third party.

I know and I still gave the answer I thought was best.

Unless you're going to run your own servers in multiple locations (or convince you friends to let you host a NUC at their homes), you're going to rely on a third party. All that changes is the type of service that you're receiving, i.e. whether it's an object store (S3, B2, etc), a virtualized server, or even a rack in a data center.

I tried Borg for sometime and it worked fine. I used to backup to a 1TB VPS. But when I decided to move to B2 I had to look for alternatives since Borg doesn't support object storage. I'm playing around with Restic[0] these days. They have recently added many nice features, e.g compression.

Looks promising. Though I wish apps like Borg/Restic had functional GUIs, even though minimal. In fact preferably minimal. Just notifications, list of archives, info about data backed up and actual space used, scheduling etc.

[0] https://restic.net

You’ll need to set up an external borg-server ONCE. From there you can additionally sync it to where ever you want using the method you want. E.g. Google cloud. As long as it's encrypted, you don't need to bother about the hosters activities. But forget the USB-sticks.

E.g.: Borg to local RAID every 2 hours, sync RAID with cloud every 24 hours.

> But forget the USB-sticks.

> E.g.: Borg to local RAID every 2 hours, sync RAID with cloud every 24 hours.

The problem with a fully online (non-append only) backup system is that if everything is working properly then an accidental 'rm -rf /' will propagate throughout all your supposed backups and destroy them as well. The USB drives are for that type of "Oh shit!" moment as a (possibly stale but better than nothing) backup of last resort

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