Ask HN: What's your personal backup strategy?

My strategy is no-backup. I do remember all my passwds, my bitcoin key is written on a wall of my living room. Few lost HDDs with photos which have nostalgic value for me may be considered like not so impornant to print it in my living room's wall. I store that HDDs on upper shelf for easing loss of data via falling down that piece of rust (the secret is I really don't need all that digital stuff, seriously. And I am heavily rely on Gmail as a critical point of access to lots of services from legal business to cryptocurrencies earned with some illegal ways. Not a decent way of backup managing but I'm sure it is kind of common.

I've put all of my backup-worthy data into text files and just github them. Sure, git keeps a lot of data, with every version of a file living as a local copy - but it's fast, scriptable, and when your archive is some 20 MB, it doesn't really matter.

Now, if I was trying to live in media files and pictures, as you seem to do, I'd check Amazon Glacier [1].

[1] https://lifehacker.com/how-to-use-amazon-glacier-as-a-dirt-c...

Spreading copies of data to multiple drives. I have configured a task to do that once a day. Are you sure it is only 50GB?

Not a perfect solution at all. Total data loss would be quite the inconvenience but it wouldn't be the end of days either. For complete windows system backups I occasionally use Acronis which is quite dependable from my experience.

If someone asks for a more professional solution I usually recommend products like Veeam and a storage like Nimble.

Pay £1.99 a month for a boat load of space on Google Drive, back up to that, then a local Synology to pull them back down locally. All passwords and important information are stored in an Enpass vault, which is also located on Google Drive.

All photos automatically go onto Google Photos and then pulled back down to my NAS. Gmail is backed up to the NAS too. All contacts in my phone are synced to Gmail too.

Basically... Google Cloud ;)

Two M-DISCs for keep-safe documents that I would be very pissed off if I lost. M-DISC is designed to last a millennium if stored properly and kept out of sunlight etc

Cloud backups in case of a house-eating disaster like hurricane, or fire. Backblaze is invaluable in this case.

Two USB flash drives with a cap to prevent rain and dust damaging the drive. I put these on my key-chain so I always have my data no matter where I travel.

Google Drive as a first line of defence. It's been solid for a really long time. However, Google Accounts get shut down without warning sometimes.

I also run hourly rsync backups to my home server, and propagate them to a Hetzner file storage server. This is done by my timeline thing [0]. The timeline thing backs up files from multiple devices, but also geolocation, social media posts, and other data I consider valuable. It's extensible, so I can add new inputs/outputs as needed.

Whatever your backup strategy is, consider the following threats:

- Your files are held hostage by ransomware, and the damage spreads to your backup

- Your house is destroyed by fire

- You lose your 2FA device

- You are locked out of your Google/Apple/Microsoft account

- You are incapacitated, and someone needs to take over

I have 4 of those factors covered. I am working on the last point.

[0] https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

Duplicacy + Wasabi. I get a terabyte of storage on Wasabi for $6/month, and the Duplicacy command line program is free. Whenever I feel like backing up, I run a single command that sends the latest (encrypted) diff of my files to Wasabi.

To recover everything from a new computer, you just install Duplicacy again and run like 2 commands.

I use the excellent HashBackup [1], unfortunately not available on Windows without trickery. It backs up to a local hard disk and to the cloud, fully-encrypted.

[1] https://www.hashbackup.com/hashbackup/index.html