Ask HN: Cheap/effective way to manage physical backups of cloud files?

3 points·anoojb··7 comments

I have my applications and files synchronize to a SaaS cloud file storage. I'd like maintain a physical copy in case of termination by the cloud provider.

What's the most cheap/effective way to manage physical/local backups that are synchronized with cloud storage provider. I'd prefer not to use another service like BackBlaze.

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You can build your own NAS, but for a much simpler way to start, buy couple of external drives and use Stable bit Drive pool application, along with https://github.com/rclone/rclone

If your cloud storage is supported by rclone, you can use that to mount the storage and then back it up, locally or to an S3 storage at a different provider. That’s how I backup my wife’s and daughter’s OneDrive, using rclone and restic.

Synchronization is not backup, learn the difference. For backup I'd choose a cold storage based on spinning disks, these things hold for 20 years unpowered with no problem. No SSDs - these fail after few years in cold storage.

Agreed, synchronisation is great but is dangerous as your only strategy, otherwise a silly deletion locally means complete loss.

I only synchronise active work, and backup everything locally onto hard usb drives, and periodically onto a drive held off-site.

Do you have a server setup to manage backups to local HDDs? Or do you periodically plugin drives for overnight backups?

Get a qnap or synology, both have apps to sync from S3 compat cloud iirc.

Thanks for the quick response. Would prefer not to buy specialized hardware.

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