My phone is synced to my laptop via Syncthing so I have a copy of everything.
Passwords in keepass, Syncthinged.
I back everythinhg up every month or two on a USB drive using ansible by creating a big gpg encrypted archive. The process is automated for both archiving and restoring; had to use restore I think 3 times in the past.
Code here: https://gitlab.com/sdwolfz/dotfiles follow the rabbit hole from `make backup`.
This works for me as I don't keep around things I don't need. Every once in a while I look around and delete things that have no use for me, and reorganise information. Especially pictures!
I don't trust any "cloud backups" as security for me has 2 important sides: 1. Phisical access. And 2. Encryption strength. Sacrificing point 1 for convenience is unthinkable to me as that is the most important part I consider.
* Daily backup of Nextcloud to another Hetzner server about 2500km away, and to another server at home.
* All data encrypted at rest.
* All encryption keys and creds in keepass file.
* Also, encrypted 400G MicroSD card with a full Linux installation and most of my data (up to a point) in my wallet. Ready to go if I'm travelling and Laptop gets stolen or breaks.
I think I’d just forget to do it after a while!
My mailbox.org account came with a few GB of cloud storage. I'll put encrypted documents on there (like tax return) because it's soo easy to encrypt / decrypt on a browser with your GPG key with their web application.
I use Mac devices (iPhone, Mac book) and have a Linux workstation.
The encryption key is stored in my KeePass password database, which is synced locally to all my devices. I back up the database separately by sending it to friends, so that if I ever lose access to all my devices I can still get my database with the key I need to get the rest of my backups.
If all that fails, like if I die or for some medical reasons suddenly forget my passwords, the encryption key is written down on a piece of paper. Stored somewhat secretly, some people I trust know where.
I back it up to a USB drive every six months, via Takeout, simply protected via password in MacOS.
Rclone (with Crypt command for encryption) for encrypted cloud sync to a single cloud provider. This is for files less suited to incremental backups e.g. large binary files that may get modified like games, movies, phone app backups etc.
- Borgbase via Vorta (a borg client) - all of it
- Tarsnap - some very important ones only because it’s much costlier
- Monthly or so copy/sync them to my external hard disk - encrypted.
- And to a pen drive as well - encrypted.
I keep pruning/cleaning my data, so they’ve not ballooned out of hand yet. Touchwood!
(I also used restic but since it never had a GUI I gave up. I am partial to simple GUI tools compared to cli for intimate purposes like backup)
What I don’t do:
- Only my personal data is “my data”. Music, films, books etc which can be bought, borrowed, “procured” again are not the things I rack my brain for.
- I use none of the Apple ecosystem services - I just use their devices - Apple is the worst of walled gardens out there.
- I don’t use any services by companies that combine a lot of services/interface in one account and one of those might be enough to block your account at some point.
A RAID array of physical drives in a local PC.
> How do you run your backups?
rsnapshot (https://rsnapshot.org/) driven from cron.
> How do you manage encryption keys, etc?
Stored in files on plural disks plus a printed to paper backup.
> What considerations drove your solution?
Must be 100% under my control -- "someone else's disks" must not ever be the primary backup medium.
Someone else's disks are far better managed than your disks and aren't susceptible to any local accidents.
(#) the /necessity/ of needing 'off-site' for mitigating fire risk means one may have no choice but to utilize 'other people's disks' to obtain the 'off-site' aspect. You do have to make sure you can recover the encryption keys for the 'off-site' data in the event of the need to recover using the off-site data, so that adds some complexity to 'key management' (i.e., if all your copies of the keys go up in the fire, the off-site data may as well not exist).
For a read only archive of pdfs and scanned papers, mail, receipts, etc: I use paperless-ngx on a nas. I'd run it on the vps but don't want that unencrypted data there. It does ocr, tags, and some learning to autotag stuff. My printer duplex scans straight into it with a few button presses, I save to a watched folder, or I email the pdf to scan@mydomain.tld. A backup is pushed out with cron encrypted to the VPS via borgbackup and sshfs along with my photos and nightly phone DCIM folder backups into \owner\yyyy\mm.
Git is a great fit for this use case because these accounts are long-lived and the history is worth tracking, I can detect all accidental manual changes and machine corruption, and I can synchronize repositories between different machines and storage drives. The contents of these Git repos only ever pass through my computers, USB ports, and LAN; they never get uploaded to the Internet, GitHub, or any cloud service.
- duplicity for daily backups to the S3 cloud encrypted with PGP (about 1GB in the bucket, excl. most photos)
- weekly Time Machine backups to two different alternating disks (one rotational, one SSD)
I've been backing up for ages. I used to use floppies. Then R/W CDROM. Then I switched to RAID. Then I switched to cloud. When I discovered how awesome time machine is when switching to a new mac, I started using that about 8 years ago.
Storing valuable data on site with physical media is just far too risky.
My critical docs are in a single folder. It is about 1GB of data. Mostly docs, but some really important audio, video, and image files.
My photos aren't considered critical (well, some are), so they are on the time machine backups.
Music is 100% Spotify.
- Local NAS rsyncs[0] encrypted backup files to a friend's NAS off-site
- Backup encryption keys carried on my person on my phone
- Password manager (pass / gopass) synced between devices with git
- Photos and videos are on local devices and occasionally synced to the NAS[1]
[0]: I'd like to improve on this since any corruption or deletion would result in propagating to the remote copy. It's the simple solution right now though.
[1]: This also needs improving but it's a lot of data.
Really important documents go in the safe deposit box in the bank.
I've lost stuff way too many times because I didn't care in the past, before I took up digital photography. I lost my personal history up to about 1997 as a result. Since then at least I have my pictures and a few videos. I turned off bitlocker, and have never used disk encryption. Losing data is far more likely than theft in my instance.
Insurance documents are printed out and stored in a plastic tote. Along with the car title & house deed, some cash, passport and other important documents in case I have to evacuate for a hurricane. I can grab it and the cat carrier, and out the door I go.
Encrypt it?
Im thinking of giving nextcloud a try to see how it compares.
Oh and Bitwarden. It's great that I can share passwords with my partner that way.
For online, accessible-anywhere data, a largely geo-blocked self-hosted Nextcloud instance running on a Partaker mini PC, backed up nightly with restic to encrypted blobs on B2, which are browseable with the wonderful restic-browser.
I use no cloud storage (except OneDrive for occasional sharing) and I move my e-mails from the server to a local mailbox after a few months to limit what an unauthorized party would see in case of a breach.
So no encryption whatsoever by design.
A: Poorly! Two, getting ready for a third, of those old school expanding/accordion style document folders under my bed. I should improve on that.
Data is scattered across dropbox and a couple external hard drives. Near term I have a project to build a NAS to keep things on and mirror the important bits to dropbox.
Waiting for a free weekend to migrate over to a raspberry pi and a minio-backed storage and set up a separate s3-level replication.
I make backups from laptop to external hard drives manually via rsync twice per week or so. I don’t store personal/sensitive data on the cloud.
On Google drive, iCloud, Dropbox and similars I keep a copy of my mp3s, wallpapers, ROMs, book PDFs, etc. But I don’t mind losing these files.
The thing I really like about this is if my hard drive goes kaput, I can boot up the external drive and be back in business in short order. Otherwise, I spend the whole day getting a replacement hard drive or computer and setting up my dev environment.
Don’t over complicate things, unless you’re on Linux.
I love this comment.
At the end of the day I pay the tax and buy Apple.
I'm similar although I like to buy clearance external HDDs, fill them up, and put them somewhere safe with some desiccant packets. Get a new one every 10~ years, copy the old to the new, then use all the additional storage for new content. Leave the old in the box with the new (even if it is less reliable, it is just "bonus backup"). Just make sure you label which year is which.
A shoebox could hold a lifetime's worth of HDDs with this strategy, and each new one is around $50~ with every increasing capacity.
Its usually less than 50MB.
Depending on the files and their sensitivity, I store them on GitHub, on my Gmail in a draft, on other computers. I just use seven zip end copy the archive.
Everything else I've basically given up on. It's on my device, and when that goes, so goes the data.
seriously yall not using tarsnap?