Hacker News Reader

Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

I have 3.5TB backed up to Backblaze for $5 a month. I haven't found any other online backup option that provides anywhere near that cost.

I use a RAID 1 to handle drive failure and also keep local backups on a NAS. BB is my third layer of backup. I've never run into issues with BB backups so I'm happy for what I get for the price.

View on HN

> I have 3.5TB backed up to Backblaze

The question this thread seems to be raising is... do you? Do you really? Are you sure?

S3 Glacier Deep Archive, $0.00099 per GB per month.

I have a ZFS based NAS. And periodically do a incremental backup (zfs send) of the entire dataset, encrypt it gpg and pipe it straight up to S3 deep archive. Works like a charm.

The catch with S3 deep archive is if you want to get the data back... It's reliable, but you will pay quite a bit more. So as a last resort backup, it's perfect.

But how do you verify or test your backups in this scenario?

Pretty much the exact reverse of backing it up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29541729

    aws s3 cp s3://... - | gpg -d ... | zfs recv ...

When restoring the order of restores matters, you first need to restore the full snapshot, and then the subsequent incremental ones in order.

I meant, how to test them without incurring a large cost.

Ah gotcha, I haven't done full restore of my main dataset.

I've only verified with a smaller test dataset to validate the workflow on s3 deep archive (retrieval is $0.02/GB). I've done full backup/restore with the zfs send/gpg/recv workflow successfully (to a non aws s3 destination), and used s3 for quite a long time for work and personal without issue, so personally I have high confidence in the entire workflow.

Can you tell how it's done specifically? Are you zfs send'ing to another directory and encrypt it entirely on the fly while transferring to Glacier?

Does it do incremental backup transfer to Glacier or does it have to transfer the entire encrypted blob every time?

No intermediate directory/file at all, all done on the fly.

    sudo zfs send -i <LAST_BACKUPED_SNAPNAME> <CUR_SNAPNAME> | gpg -e -r <YOURKEY> --compress-algo none -v | pv | aws s3 cp --storage-class DEEP_ARCHIVE - s3://<PATH_TO_DEST>.zfs.gpg

The very first time you do it, you will need to do a full backup (ie. without the `-i <...>` option). Afterwards, subsequent backups can be done with the -i, so only the incremental difference will be backed up.

I have a path/naming scheme for the .zfs.gpg files on s3 which include the snapshot from/to names. This allows to determine what the latest backed up snapshot name is (so the next one can be incremental against that). And also use when backing up, since the order or restore matters.

If you want to try another sketchy service, I use iDrive which was $9.95 for 10TB for the first year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com