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Comment by idatum | Hacker News Reader

I need 3 stores to feel I'm keeping safe years of digital family photos. 1) I have a live (local) FreeBSD ZFS server running for backups and snapshots; 2 pairs of mirrored physical drives 2) I have a USB device that takes 2 mirrored drives to recv ZFS snapshots from #1; I store that vdev backup in a safe place 3) I backup entire datasets to cloud storage from off-prem using rclone.

It's #3 where I need to do some more research/work. I need to spend some time sending snapshots/diffs to cloud blob storage and make sure I can restore. Yes, I know there is rsync.net.

Any experiences to share?

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I bought a cheap HP Microserver with four 4 TB spinning disks that I placed at a relatives house ~1000 km from where I live. I do nightly replication to the off-site location, with an account on the receiving end that only has enough permissions to create snapshots and receive data, so even if that ssh key somehow got out in the wild things could not be deleted from the remote store. I hope :)

Clarification: Remote end also uses ZFS, so I can use cheap replication with encryption

My setup is similar. +1 that Restic is great. My cloud backup was sending blobs to Google workspace, but they have clamped on storage. I will be replacing that with another box at my parents that will be tucked out of the way. I will just have that wireguard tunnel to my home network and send snapshots to it. At some point I'll turn down the workspace solution and probably also unsubscribe.

I'm using Borg to back up to rysnc.net.

Borg spilts your files up into chunks, encrypts them and dedupes them client-side and then syncs them with the server. Because of the deduping, versioning is cheap and you can configure how many daily, weekly, monthly, &c. copies to keep. For example you could keep 7 day's worth of copies, 6 monthly copies and 10 yearly copies.

Rysnc.net have special pricing for customers using Borg/Restic:

https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

https://www.rsync.net/products/restic.html

I use Restic and backup to rsync.net for remote backups. Works great.

I'm not working with much data though so even if I wanted to I couldn't get a ZFS send/receive account with rsync.net. I like the way rsync.net give you separate credentials for managing the snapshots. This way even if my NAS gets compromised i will still have all the periodic snapshots.

For me privacy is my main concern and Restic's security model is good for me. The backup testing features are good too and rsync.net doesn't charge for traffic so these two work good together. I don't use the snapshots though because rsync.net already supports this via ZFS.

I have a similar setup, though with Linux. From my experience I can recommend taking a look at restic (https://restic.readthedocs.io/). It does encrypted and deduplicated snapshots to local and remote repositories. There's a good selection of remote target options available, but you can also use it with rclone to use any weird remote. Just remember to keep a backup of your encryption key somewhere besides the machine you back up ;-)

Are you running regular scrubs with ZFS and checking the results?

In your experience, what is a good schedule for scrubs?

I do one about every month or so. I should probably add a crontab for that.

Weekly is good as a generic answer. The specifics of what you store and the value you place on them could warrant tweaks up or down. The time it takes to perform a full scrub could also be a factor.

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