Ask HN: Is this backup solution fine? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is this backup solution fine?

4 pointsflexagoon4 comments

I decided to set up automatic backup of my files from my phone and laptop to Backblaze B2. I didn't find a good solution to sync photos from my phone directly to Backblaze, so I decided to do the following:

1. Sync photos from my phone to my laptop using Syncthing

2. Back up those photos as well as other files from the laptop to Backblaze using Restic

Is this backup solution fine, or are there any issues with it?

Also, most of the stuff I need to back up, even on my laptop, are photos/videos. Is there a point in using Restic with it's deduplication and incremental backups for this use case, or should I just use Rclone directly? I'd assume deduplication won't save me much storage because photos generally don't have similar byte chunks, although I may be wrong.

I find most of my photos to be cruft, and take time to delete photos that are no longer relevant, or have lost their initial value. I don't take many photos, I'm talking about memes and interesting things I found online. Over time these build up if you don't take the time to delete most of them. Then when I reach ~1000 photos in my camera roll, I just put them in cold storage on Amazon Glacier and forget about them.

could you elaborate a bit on Amazon Glacier? IS there a convoluted process or its a simple cli?

Glacier can be expensive to retrieve. idrive e2 costs about 0.0016$/GB/mo if you go annual plan, and free egress (up to 3x storage amount).

I’m in process of working through multiple older devices. My challenges so far have been forgotten passwords, not knowing picture/ video format specific to the device, locating the images/videos on the devices. I am in process of moving all images/videos to one location. Once done I will need similar offsite backup. Not there yet but I appreciate the insight into this final aspect of picture/video storage

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