Do you have any advice as to HOW the average home NAS user can affordably backup modern NAS devices?
The last time I looked it could easily cost hundreds of dollars per month to back up as little as 40TB to the cloud.
Backup what you value the most, ignore what you don't and apply tiers depending on what needs to be kept but you can deal with transferring it back home slowly and what you need immediately in case of a failure.
My rules of thumb are:
- always invest 3x the price of your hot live NAS storage in backups. If you can't afford buying 40TB of storage, you can't afford having 10TB of live storage. Period. Goal is to have at least one copy locally and one externally and have more space to on the backup storages to account for retentions, changes and help with migrations.
- if you can't afford 3 redundant storages(RAID), favor having 3 times non redundant storage (no RAID) over having less copies of redundant one.
Additional tip to reduce cost and avoid expensive cloud offering is to find a reliable and trustable relative or friend that can host your external copy of your backup. Nebula or Tailscale now makes it very easy without having to configure routers and stuff. In exchange you can offer that person to host his/her backup storage.
Also digitalizing material stuff is nice, but printing digital photos is also a great way to preserve copies. I'd rather save the photos I cherish the most than having 3 backup copies of 10TB of blurry or non outstanding photos. After years of having them all digitally, I am inveting back in printing photos and making albums. You can also print photobook multiple times and have some stored at a relative's place.
My NAS has something like 5 TB used. It's all synced to an old server that can hold about 8 TB and that's off most of the time (no fun living next to a jet engine). This cold server lives at my parents' house.
My "really important stuff" on the NAS, which is a few hundred GB of pictures and such, is regularly backed up to a bucket with object locking.
My "super important stuff", which is my company's accounting and other such documents, and lives on my laptop, is backed up to the live NAS and handled there as the really important stuff. I also back up my laptop to two normally offline external drives, one of which lives in my apartment and the other at my parents' house.
Everything non-cloud is ZFS, so after each backup to an external drive or "cold NAS", I run a scrub to make sure it is still operational. The live NAS runs a scrub every Monday morning.
Granted, this is not a "modern NAS" environment, since it made no sense to me to forego the free servers that my employer was going to send to the trash and buy some expensive off-the-shelf solution without the guarantees of ZFS (despite the issue TFA talks about). I know about power usage, but my live NAS eats less than 50W at idle (which is 99% of the time), so breaking even with the electricity prices in France would take forever.
Which is how it should be. Yes bugs can happen but there's only so many 9s most of us can chase on our budgets. And "always test backups" in particular adds cost. Testing means restoring onto hardware that you can then use live, separate from your actual primary hardware or at a minimum on primary hardware with >2x the set size and enough performance to squeeze it in during downtime or around work. So yet another big increase in cost. "Testing backups" isn't trivial.
I know you can use ZFS snapshots but I'm not experienced enough to trust that I could make a 20-40tb snapshot without screwing something up. Plus it's all video files so I can roughly keep track of what's what and I can ignore the stupid LTO compression.
It takes days, its noisy, and very tedious. But thats #hoarderLyfe lol
We have about 9TB of photos. I can easily imagine someone like us, who is into video, of having more than 40TB of videos.
My parents tend to take a lot of photos whenever the family is together, and it used to bother me. Only in recent years I started to understand them.
Today you might take 10 photos of your family and keep the best one where everyone is smiling.
But 10-20 years from now you will probably appreciate having kept the other 9 where the baby is crying, the kid is making a face, and grandma has started to wander off.
Downside to tape backup is you need throughput, or the ability to do disk-disk backups
20 TB of SSD costs about $1000.
Or you could get a 20 TB hard drive for $300.
I have had multiple hard drives fail and been left stranded. Tape fails but not nearly as often as disks
LTO6 and LTO7 are not expensive for 20TB
If you can figure out how to split the data into categories, you could save money as well. E.g., which of this data is truly irreplaceable - stuff like personal photos, source code, whatever it is that can never be re-created. If you're running a business, then stuff that needs to be available immediately in order to keep the lights on. Those things needs to be on storage that also gets backed up daily, preferably in full, and preferably to multiple clouds.
Stuff that can be re-created from sources (e.g., rendered outputs) are less critical because in the worst case, you can just spend some days/weeks to re-create it.
Also consider regular offline backups - put it on a tape drive or on some hard disks/SSDs or even optical media (yes, it would take something like 400 BDXL disks to back up 40 TB, but I assume the data doesn't rapidly change) and put it in some offsite storage facility in case your place burns down.
For sensitive data I would run something else that can be a Restic target so backup data is encrypted, I currently use a cloud drive that supports WebDAV for that.
Glacier is always super cheap as long as you don’t need to recover, and then it’s ferocious.
Also, you can probably tier your data. Maybe you don’t need same level of backup for all your 40TB.
You only have to backup the data that is important to you and you don't want to lose in case your house gets robbed, floods, burns down, etc.
If you don't mind losing 40T of data, you don't have to back it up at all.
Otherwise get another NAS, installed it at family/friend's house, and set up a VPN between the two: then use rsync/zfs-send/whatever.
Glacier vaults in S3 are quite affordable these days.