Selfhosted

I use physical drives that I backup and swap weekly. I'm not a business and this is good enough for the things I want to save, in case everything goes BOOM! I was probably one of the first to say "A Cloud? That would be just someone else's computer. Why would you store your valuable data in somebody else's computer? That makes no sense!"

I don't have any :')

My "cloud backup" is a NAS in another room. If the house cathes fire, there's an earthquake or the volcano I live close erupts I say bye bye to everything

To me backups in the cloud are no backups. I could never physically get to the disk and someone else controls my account.

My 1st backups go to a NAS (with encrypted raid disks) in my garage that is 35 meters away from my house. The 2nd backup are encrypted files (encrypted disks are not practical, it's a challenge after power-dips etc) to a storage at my daughters place. That second option goes via my own vpn which also gives me the opportunity to go out on the internet there (convenient for some tv shows my wife wanna see)

I use Backblaze personal backup for $9 per month with unlimited storage. I’ve backed up many terabytes without an issue.

My backup method

On a serious note, I'm working on it. I have another proxmox node which I'm in the process of building, which should have a backup system. So weekly backups from my main proxmox node will be transferred to the backup node.

I have a vps I use for other stuff, and put syncthing on it. My files are replicated between it, my computer and my phone. On the vps I activated the setting to store old versions

For photos I use hetzner's storage share, a nextcloud offering. Photos are browsable with nextcloud's "memories" app, really useful.

I don't really believe in "backups", ie a full copy of the content in another format that is unusable unless you run it through a special restoring process. If the files are being copied, why not make it useful ? Syncthing makes it so all environments are equally usable, and the versioning prevents mistakes. There is no restore phase: the files are already usable.

I really think we need to move our thinking away from the one-machine-with-copies mindset, and architecture our usages around multiple-machines-by-default. If the goal of backups is resiliency, a syncthing clusters achieves that.

Running server backs up to two local disks which can each hold 2 days at a time, but they both hold the same 2 days. Every night the most recent backup is uploaded offsite (friend's house) where is stored versions in a normal scheme.

I look up at the clouds and pray my hard drive doesn't crap out.

I use Azure Storage Accounts - costs about $0.76 for 37GB per month. I'm still using an old Synology DS918+ but it backs up automatically to the Storage account every day. If you go that route, be sure to edit the network configuration, set it to only access from "selected networks", and then put in your home IP or CIDR. Use that and an access token so you have at least two controls preventing the internet from accessing it.

Way back when, my Dad always told me to have at least three copies of everything, because one backup is no backup. So I have a 1TB Storage Box at Hetzner (€4/month, in a different datacenter than my VPSes) I push backups to with Restic. I also backup to a local machine (also with restic), and to my Dad's NAS (you guessed, with restic), and to my old Debian server until I decommission it (also with restic).

All legs have different retention settings, based on how much space I have at a particular backup site.

I'm only concerned about my Immich library right now. It's hosted on a local Unraid server. Nightly I have a flat file backup rcloned to another local server and a micro PC at my parent's house. Once a week Duplicacy does a chunked encrypted backup to Backblaze B2.

I'm messing around with some other backup software though. Not super happy with Duplicacy but it's working for now.

My cloud is at my parent's house in a different continent.

48tb of my own data and hardware.

My solution is surprisingly Microsoft OneDrive, but hear me out. I have the family plan that gives you 1TB per account and you can have up to 6 in the family, giving you a total of 6TB. The thing is, I don't trust Microsoft, so I use rclone with a crypt remote that encrypts everything before it reaches OneDrive and the encryption key lives in the rclone config on my machine. Make multiple local copies of this file and you're all set. You can replicate this with any storage provider and you don't have to trust them.

I donated a server to my brother across the country to use as his media server, it also doubles as my own offsite backup. And vice versa for his, although he's not really tech savvy enough to care.

I use restic to:

1. A Raspberry Pi with an external 4 TB SSD at a friend's house a few hours drive away
2. Jottacloud

Storj

A Hetzner Storage Box, 1TB for 3,89€

I bounced around a bit after Storj decided to hate consumers and institute massive minimums.

I've landed on Backblaze B2, S3 compatible. Add others have mentioned, doing a shared NAS 2 NAS hookup with a friend or family member is a nice ideal way to do it without monthly fees.

I use Borg backup from my PCs to a NAS (QNAP), and from there using the built in backup software to go off-site. My self hosted PCs will mount NAS drives directly (like immich and audiobookshelf) and those are also in the NAS off-site job.

rclone local Restic backup to a hetzner storagebox.

I went with rsync.net, grabbed a promo at some point and have been getting 1.6TB for $10/mo. They support a wide range of protocols (sshfs, sftp, rsync, borg, synology, guides for freenas and truenas), snapshots, idle alerts, geo redundancy for a fee. Been very happy with it so far. Had to retrieve some files once and had no issue.

I use Filen, I don't know if they still do it but you used to be able to buy a lifetime plan for a one-time fee that was like 50-100GB or something like that, and you could stack them. So I just bought several during a Black Friday sale.

I use borg backup to a Hetzner storage box, which costs $5 a month.

For a gui interface, I've been using Pika backup.

I use Backblaze B2. About 512GB for about $3-4 a month. Its my secondary backup so hopefully will never have to use it 🤣

Restic. Nightly backups to local, then Cloudflare R2, then BorgBase. All free.

Hard drives in an old Mionix mouse box padded with bubble wrap, regularly swapped between 2 locations.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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The cheapest options I've found over the years are mostly black Friday sales on lifetime plans. Be careful who you trust, of course. There are lots of scammy ones out there, but there are also some reputable companies that have been around a good long while still offering lifetime plans. Check reviews before buying.

Over the years I've picked up cheap(ish) lifetime memberships with pCloud, Koofr, and Filen. I've already gotten my money's worth out of them.

I use Borg to create encrypted backups on an external HD, and then I periodically sync that to cloud providers. I prefer E2EE services but it's not a strict requirement for backups since Borg encrypts them anyway.

On Windows I recommend Kopia instead of Borg, at least until Borg gets an official stable windows build (planned for 2.0, currently in beta)

I exclude most things I could re-download like games and movies so 1TB covers my needs pretty well.

Borgbase - 1TB for $90 a year but they have smaller options. I then use Restic as my previous Borg setup kept stopping and couldn't figure out why