Ask HN: Consumer hardware setup for long-term backups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Consumer hardware setup for long-term backups?

2 points_bxg13 comments

The iCloud development has gotten me thinking about my usage of major cloud storage solutions, including Dropbox. I've been getting increasingly annoyed with Dropbox's product changes lately anyway, so I'm thinking about setting up my own solution.

In terms of size, half a terabyte (or maybe a terabyte to be comfy) would do. My main priority is durability: I don't want to worry about a drive failure (durability is the main reason I've used Dropbox for so long; my house could burn down and my data would be safe).

Presumably I should go with an SSD for durability (?) seeing how sensitive HDDs are to movement/magnets/mechanical failure in general. Should I bother trying to do some kind of RAID redundancy setup, or is that overkill? Any other thoughts or suggestions? All-in-one backup solutions would also be interesting, as would cloud storage solutions that are end-to-end encrypted.

In my opinion, unless you need high speed backups, I would not worry about SSD. Rather, I would get several external USB3 drives and label them by day or week. Then alternate external drives to back up to. To keep multiple versions of files, you could use rsnapshot which is just a perl script that does some fancy linking of identical vs changed files to save space. [1] All drives fail, no matter how expensive they are. If you have multiple drives and multiple backups, then you can even store one offsite somewhere, just in case. There are plenty of free tools for each OS to do disk encryption on the USB3 drives.

[1] - https://github.com/rsnapshot/rsnapshot

> unless you need high speed backups, I would not worry about SSD

They're cheap enough now and my space needs are small enough that I think the tradeoff is worth it: I don't have to worry about jostling them if I move, for example.

> I would get several external USB3 drives and label them by day or week. Then alternate external drives to back up to.

That's a neat idea. It does mean more hardware and would make it tricker to do things like network syncing, which I was interested in setting up, but it would take care of both the reliability issue and rudimentary versioning in one stroke. I'll give it consideration.

For the networking aspect, you could create a hybrid. i.e. set up a VPS VM, though 1TB disk space will be pricey... but then you could have sftp chroot and use lftp and it's mirror subsystem to get the same effect as rsync, but more secure, then have a client at home which pulls down that data to the USB drives. Maybe it just does lftp to one USB drive at home, then rsync copies from that drive to a second drive for redundancy and/or use rsnapshot for versioning.

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