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Comment by raybb | Hacker News Reader

If not putting them online publicly how do you store / organize them?

I just recently bought a NAS for 20 euros and have been thinking about setting it up but am skeptical of relying on it for anything too important. But then again don't feel I can really trust anything too important to be in google drive either.

I also even have a hetzner nextcloud instance that I use for most low/medium importance stuff but I've found it a bit unreliable with the connection failing, mountainduck causing finder to crash, and the website getting quite sluggish when I upload a bunch of photos.

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As everyone else said, redundancy equals reliability. You can automatically sync to AWS or backblaze for offsite backups. Locally you'll want a second and/or third backup. My proxmox server syncs to a USB hard drive locally, then I manually take that to the office now and then to sync to a different drive I store in my desk. Critical stuff is also stored in a third drive I keep in a firebox at home.

You can automate as much or as little as you want, but you have to keep multiple copies around. You can't trust any single source. Individual drives fail, tapes go bad, cloud storage can disappear or become corrupt.

The 3-2-1 rule is a good place to start. Three copies on two different media, and at least one copy off-site

The key is multiple copies everywhere. Storage is cheap these days, so you can keep more than one copy - and digital hoarding doesn’t take up much space at all.

The problem with multiple copies everywhere that is:

1) You can never remember which copy is the master or the most recent. And a backup is not a backup unless you test the restore regularly. But with multiple copies, we don't have the time to test the restores of all the backups.

2) If any of the syncing scripts stop working, you will not know for ages. Unless you have another layer of monitoring scripts that watch your backup scripts. But almost no one has the patience to do that.

I have at least 3 copies of my important files, in 3 different locations. But I fail on both of my points above.

I don't store much stuff, so I mostly backup to AWS S3 and Backblaze (duplicated). I use Arq on windows and mac machines, and restic on linux. Job done! I'm looking at getting a NAS soon myself and then I'll backup or save to that as needed.

If you're not storing much then it's pretty cheap. For me it's mostly just photos and important documents, it comes to no more than a few 100GB total and costs me maybe 5 USD per month if that.

Kind of jealous of your 20 Euro NAS. But generally the key to longevity is having data in many independent locations. Since you're already using Hetzner, backing up your NAS to a Hetzner StorageBox is easy and cheap. The StorageBoxes are occasionally down for maintenance and don't have top performance, but for backup they are fine. Then you can just use the NAS as primary storage.

Not the best system but I back everything up to two separate hard-drives (code goes in GitHub as well). I've been trying to get everything off Google Drive after the stories of a file with just the character 1 set off piracy filters earlier this year (or maybe late last year).

Where did you buy a NAS for 20 Euros?

My old DNS-320 was ~100 euro new. And it kind of sucked.

An ancient Synology Disk Station DS112j with a 1TB hdd from fb marketplace.

I've never had a NAS before so wanted to play around with it before deciding to invest in a nicer one that can do more like handle Plex.

After my DNS-320 I concluded to make it do everything I wanted, I need to really have a full OS I have control over.

So I built a box from one of those 4 bay Mini ITX chassis'. More expensive but I am loving the FOSS options like JellyFin.

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