Ask HN: What are you using for backups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you using for backups?

10 pointsbrtkdotse11 comments

My new computer is arriving soon and I’d like to have backups running on it from day 1. Right now I have a manual process where I dump stuff on S3, but I’d much rather pay someone trustworthy so I don’t have to think about it.

Backblaze and Crashplan are two options that have come up, anything else? I’m ruling out Dropbox/OneDrive/iCloud since I want one-way sync (lots of heavy audio files that I work on extensively)

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I don’t personally like “whole system” backup services like Backblaze Backup and Crashplan. They end up backing up too much system cruft that I don’t care about. And it’s not like they create a beautiful bootable image or anything, right? Also watch for the “unlimited” plans. If historical deletions are important to you, these aren’t a fit. Files you delete on your system eventually get deleted in backups, too.

I find that most data is better kept elsewhere (bookmarks in browser sync tools, email and contacts with email provider, personal documents in cloud providers, multimedia - yes, copied to multiple external drives or a NAS, S3 - maybe write a script and schedule it).

I used Arq Backup for about a year and while I liked the idea, the UI is absolutely awful and the restores were painfully slow. It’s way too hard to control the backup behavior to do what you want. I didn’t feel like I could trust that the data was going to be reliably restored.

For system migrations, I just use target disk mode to go from old Mac to new with the migration assistant, which is also stupidly fast between Thunderbolt 3 SSD Macs if you’re using a proper cable (300MB/second for me). Very nice for when you want to satisfy your new computer excitement.

I feel that time machine has the same utility, or to provide backups to non-technical users who either refuse the cloud or don’t know how to work a file manager (or both).

This could be a pain but depending on your needs: an often forgotten option to look into is Blu-ray Discs. They could be a nice option especially for redundant long term storage and the price per gigabyte is very low.

I dislike the idea of backing up my data on other people's computers and disk drives. And paying for all that internet bandwidth is another negative.

So I have several USB3 external hard drives which I backup to in rotation, more or less the same sequence as we used to do with LTO tapes. On Apple Macs I use TimeMachine and on the Linux servers some custom scripts which basically achieve the same result.

Of course, the backup scripts exclude temporary and other non-essential files. The other key factor is to monitor drive errors and being aware of the MTBF of disk drives and replace them before they become unreliable.

I'm personally happy with rsync.net for offsite backup storage of my personal stuff, they're active on HN and decently priced imho. My use case consists of random rsync/sftp selective backups and bare git repositories. Not sure how great the experience is with large media assets but if it's in the price range you're willing to put up, they seem quite dedicated to the backup use case and support is supposedly good if you ever run into problems. I've never had to contact them though, it was pretty much setup and forget.

I use DVDs for backups. All of my files (when compressed in tape archives) fit on three DVDs (one for /home, one for /var, and one for all other files; this includes all system files too).

However, you might have more files than I have, so DVDs might not be suitable for you. See how many files you have so that you can see how many DVDs you would need, and then you can see if it is suitable for you or not.

I’m using restic and b2 to backup anything important I care about. All system junk I don’t bother to backup. All in all, I’m paying around $8/month to backup my important documents, photos etc. Restic lets me encrypt them as well, so bonus points definitely.

TIL: rustic supports Windows: https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/020_installation.htm...

I have a storage box on Hetzner ( https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box ), and I use rclone every day to one-way sync the backup folders.

I have also used Backblaze before, works the same way with rclone.

I use arq for automatic daily backups to s3 as well as Time Machine once a month to an external HD for an extra layer of redundancy. But more importantly than that, I have a checklist for testing that my backups actually work and that I won't somehow end up locked out of a server etc.

Great feedback, thanks everyone! One thing I forgot to mention is that I’m on Windows, is there a good rsync clone I could use?

ZFS makes this almost too easy. I just create zfs snapshots and 'zfs send' them to a backup drive.

tarsnap?

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