I mainly write text and code. I have a few photos.
Any opinions on what I should use for daily incremental backups?
The simplest approach seems to be a thumbdrive. These can store giant amounts of data these days.
I am not sure how reliable they are though.
Is an external SSD better?
Or even a good old spinning disk?
And/or cron driving rsync, rsnapshot, or both for iterative backup to the vps over sshfs. I actually use this to pull data back from the vps to my nas for local backup of documents.
Colin is "Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD".
It’s end to end encrypted. So there are no privacy concerns.
And you get get Microsoft 365 family, which gives you 5x 1tb accounts for something like $60 per year.
This ends up super cheap and protects your data even if your house burns down as it’s off-site.
Cloud is either not private and slow, or recurrently expensive.
A 10TB+ disk unit costs around $200 and is private. You could buy a few of these and swap them every few months or yearly.
That said, I ran into problems with T7 series. Sometimes they take several seconds to "spin up" and register with the USB bus, so if a machine is woken up from hibernation, the drive may appear only after the machine itself is up. Meaning, if the drive is actively used by running software, the latter will see it disappear and reappear around the hibernation, killing all open file handles and such.
But, another caveat, is that SSDs aren't recommended for long-term archival. Or at the very least this is a "common knoweldge" on the datahoarders sub. The advice is to use conventional HDDs for that.