So backups. I’ve just migrated off my last ESXi server at home and while I did the migration I looked at my backup strategy for my dedi’s and home data. At the moment I have the following
Files / Media - OneDrive Live Sync’d
VMs - Image level backup once a week (local ones are backed up locally, remote ones backup to here
VMs - Files / config backed up nightly
Firewalls / Appliances - Config backed up as config changes to NextCloud and Sync’d to OneDrive
As you can see there are a couple of major issues. The first the home VMs don’t leave the host (although they are on separate RAID arrays) and the second is the frequency, although I am not to worried about this as the configs / files are backed up daily. The VMs are a mix of Windows and Linux, the largest one has a data drive of 1.5Tb (SATA RAID, backed up to a USB drive, as well as OneDrive).
I would like to add a level of offsite-ness for the images and the files. I am going round and round in circles in my head… There is approximately 1.8Tb of data I’d like to protect more.
Do I
a) rent a Kimsufi mini dedi 2Tb and roll my own, probably just rsync the images and files once a day
b) B2
c) Wasabi
d) Raspberry Pi in the garage with 2Tb USB drive
I am in the UK…
What do others do? What would you recommend? Any providers / solutions I haven’t thought of?
I’d probably vote A or D. Personally, I back up my local files and configs to a local NAS (2 x 4TB) and to an encrypted GDrive. No storage cap on the GDrive, but I’ll periodically (once every month or two) go through and delete any old/duplicate backups that I don’t need any longer to not abuse the storage too much.
But… there’s more than one way to skin a cat and I’m sure everyone here has their own method to their madness, so you’ll probably just want to figure out what works best for you. I like having a copy of everything locally (hence why I use a NAS), but you’ll be paying more up front for the initial investment of the hardware. Remote storage boxes are nice if you don’t mind the traffic, but that bill does add up over time and just be mindful that providers such as Kimsufi/Online are probably using old drives/hardware that could fail at any point in time. Block storage with some such as Fran/BuyVM comes out pretty cheap too ($1.25/250gb/mo iirc) and you can scale as needed and buy more storage, so that’s an option as well. LetBox usually run some nice block storage specials as well (something like $7/mo for 3TB, maybe be on the lookout for black friday sales next week).
There’s been some other threads on this subject, so you might get some ideas by perusing them:
So I am going with option d. I have setup a pi which I am rsync’ing to which will be in the garage. Then I am going to rclone sync that to OneDrive (luckily I have a license so can copy 5Tb up).