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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

If my cloud backup backend provider cancels my account, my backup software will quickly complain. There will be a window of exposure, but I can act quickly.

If my backup harddrive is in the same house as my main storage and my house burns down, I'm fucked.

If I'm fancy, I may have multiple backend storage providers, too. Lot easier to do that then to have multiple houses. I wanted to use a safe deposit box in the past, but last time I called banks near me, they didn't even have safe deposit boxes available to rent! I can ask some friends, but then will be limited in frequency of updates, still.

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"Redundant Array of Inexpensive Cloud Storage Providers is not a backup!!!" <grin>

(Can we make RAICSP a thing? Or do multi-cloud solution vendors already has a snappy marketing term for storing everything on all of S3, Azure Blob, and Google Storage at once?)

It's not? Why?

Yeah, I’m falling on this too. A client with write-only privs to a buckets on multiple cloud storage providers is literally the most durable backup in human existence right now. Like nothing else will get you worldwide DR and 30+ 9’s of durability.

3 (designed for) 10 9’s systems whose failure modes are wholly independent might be 30 9s.

I strongly suspect (as in “for the right price would stake my life on it”) that there are some common failure modes across the major cloud vendors’ offerings.

Your advice is directionally sound (and is what I do for family docs and photos); I just think it has fewer meaningless 9s than you’re imagining.

Sorry, just riffing on the “RAID is not a backup” that gets yelled at everybody who ever did an rm -rf on their raid by accident…

It's probably not a bad idea, but if they're all linked to a single e-mail account/provider, things might turn sour quickly.

I haven't yet implemented it but perhaps a reciprocal syncthing arrangement with an IT knowledgeable friend?

I didn't think syncthing supported encrypted replicas - that's why I passed on it years ago for a dropbox-like use case. I wanted to have a replica in the cloud as a relay, without having to fully trust the machine. A quick google suggests they may have something beta along these lines, so this may change.

I believe Resilio can do it, but it is closed source.

If you're looking for backups and not dropbox-like functionality, then something like restic might be more appropriate. It does actual content addressed backups, so you've got history for those times when you realized you messed something up six backups ago.

Syncthing now supports untrusted encrypted nodes, and it's fairly reliable.

Companies like Iron Mountain provide this service to businesses. Even if a bank no longer offers safe deposit boxes (and you were relying on their "safe", which for small banks was an arbitrary thing), there are usually facilities in larger cities that offer the same sort of service.

Just went through this with my family (in Australia) when the local bank branch said they were shutting down the service. It was basically a locked room in their branch, there was no "safe" involved.

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