Comment by TranquilMarmot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TranquilMarmot | Hacker News Reader

I have a server in a closet with a few hard drives attached to it. All of my devices connect to it via Tailscale.

I use the wonderful https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest as a web UI around restic.

Every night, I back the data up to a Hetzner storage box https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/ which is only ~$3.50/mo USD for 1TB of data.

I have three "tiers" of data for myself:

1. Important things I care about: these go into a folder that gets backed up to Hetzner (examples include photos in Immich, code pushed to Forgejo, etc)

2. Smaller files I sort-of care about: these usually just go into Proton Drive (examples include design documents)

3. Large files I don't care about losing: these go into a folder on a hard drive that is not backed up (examples include media)

This took me about a day to set up and I just check in on it every once in a while. Once a year I will do a practice disaster recovery run.

What does your practice recovery run look like? I've got backup set up, but I don't know how to best test it. For example, do you restore everything from Hetzner, or some random sample?

I don't like these staged backup for these reasons. Every step (e.g. NAS backup to Hetzner) can cause an error, so adding steps increases the probability of error. Personally, I just back up directly from my machines to a local storage server and to a cloud object storage with object lock (so that e.g. ransomware encryption or attempts to remove the data do not work).

What cloud object storage do you use? I went with Hetzner because I was optimizing for price.

Right now, I just restore everything to a new folder and make sure that I can stand up Immich, Forgejo, etc. again and point it there and have it working. DB backups for Immich are handled automatically, but for Forgejo I had to write a custom script that does a dump of the DB every night. I'm not sure I could do a partial Immich/Forgejo restore since it would be missing so many files.

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