It blows my mind to think that some random schmuck like me has better backup procedures than these multibillion dollar global corporations.
Companies that don't invest in their IT end up paying for it tenfold down the track.
It's not perfect. I can imagine a scenario where the canary is restorable, but some other important files aren't. However it certainly protects against cases where a bug in the backup software makes a completely unreadable snapshot (which has happened to me before).
All important files on Synology Ds218+ NAS, which has 2x12TB helium HDDs in mirror.
Daily HyperBackup to Google Drive. I test restoring files on a monthly basis.
Email alerts on failure.
Anything I can improve?
What you have is fine for short-term recovery - but I'd make sure you have a long-term and/or cold-storage option set up. It doesn't need to be anything particularly fancy: I'd get a rugged+ portable+external single-drive USB enclosure with a single 16TB drive and have the Synology do a backup of your most critical data onto that drive and store it in your bank's safety deposit box or better yet: leave it with a trusted friend who lives in rural Minnesota or similar.
It goes without saying to encrypt that drive as you won't have full custody of it: but use a simple, proven encryption scheme with a large ecosystem that you know that you'll be able to decrypt in 10-20 years' time.
For backup drives that I keep local to me, I refuse to encrypt them because (in my experience) the possibility of being unable to decrypt data in a desperate or urgent situation just makes me wince.
I did however have a recent health scare and it made me wonder how my non tech wife could possibly have restored the files as the interfaces are all heavy.
Not a factor I'd previously considered when assessing my backup/restore.
That was my thinking. It seems a good fit as a last-resort backup. Low month-on-month storage costs, high retrieval costs. So we're essentially betting that we'll never retrieve the data. Which seems fine.
Also, it apparently has strong assurances against data-loss. Lots of nines. [0]
> how my non tech wife could possibly have restored the files as the interfaces are all heavy
It's all web-API-based, right? Is there a a decent FOSS GUI to navigate it?
I use a Linux perl client!
To my knowledge, Amazon offer no means of prepaying.
Business idea: cloud archive storage where you pay when you upload data and optionally pay a modest monthly fee for real-time access to stored data, but they'll guarantee to keep your data for you if you stop paying: you'll just need to pay to retrieve that data.
As the long-term archival data wouldn't need to be stored in a data-center: just a commodity tape-library box in a basement in a farm somewhere near a freeway I imagine it would be kinda cheap to run as a business. You could set-up a Foundation or other entity to ensure long-term continuity of operations and have it self-sufficient through an endowment. E.g. a $1m endowment would easily pay for something like this into perpetuity.
You'd also need to charge enough upfront that you can still turn a profit if they stop paying immediately. Asking for upfront payment of 40 years of data-storage fees, might be a problem.
> a commodity tape-library box in a basement in a farm somewhere near a freeway
I'm not a data-storage expert by any means, but that doesn't sound anywhere near good enough. You need to redundantly protect against flood, fire, crime, etc. You'll also need to be able to retrieve data at scale. You're essentially rolling your own Amazon Glacier.
Another option I've been meaning to set-up is two-way Synology sync between sites. My parents have a Synology box and now that they have a decent internet connection (DOCSIS, not ADSL's 768kbps upstream) we could backup each others' data on each other's Synology boxes. I just need to figure it out...
Is that really backup or a sync? If you have a bitrot (or a ransomware attack encrypts it) in an important file on your disk, and you don't notice it for a week and that file gets sent to Google Drive, will you still be able to restore the original version?
So, for example, ssh key access from backup to production, but not vice versa. Definitely keeping that backup system as simple and low access as possible.