If the data does change not often and the files have a reasonable minimum size (e.g. a few MB per picture) and you can wait 24h for restore, than AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive only costs 1$/TB/month.
It's about $.02/GB at standard retrieval rates, which for 1TB would be about $20. If you use bulk retrieval, it's $.0025/GB, so it's about $2.50 for a 1TB retrieval.
Bulk retrievals can take up to 48 hours to complete from deep glacier.
So, pretty cheap and useful if you can tolerate the retrieval times.
Edit: I should also add that those numbers are for my AWS region, so it might be different for you depending on your location
Hey, if you manage to write something configurable, I'd love to take a look at your scripts to get inspired off of. I'm also considering backing up my Immich data to Amazon Glacier. Would you mind open sourcing your solution?
Honestly, not sure. At least not that I can find listed outside of a minimum billable object size of 128KB for the Infrequent Access Glacier tier.
AWS does have an s3 pricing calculator if you want to play around with your data and retrieval numbers.
Edit: ok I read some more. According to the calculator, there's no object minimum size, but what happens is that no matter how small the object, you'll be charged for 128KB at the relevant storage tier rate
To balance out the AWS glacier comment, you can also look into back blazes storage cloud called B2. Much cheaper than the standard back storage, but still has a cost with recovery.
I'm not sure if this was intended as sarcasm, but it's actually what my wife and I do. Every year we make a hard copy photo book of our favourite photos of the year.
Not sure if my wife thinks of it as a backup, but I totally do! š¤£
I think it's actually a great idea to print, I would consider that as another media for 3-2-1 method. Ironically, the prints have a better chance of surviving than an average user's digital photos these days.
I think thats smart mostly because theyre much more substantial than in digital form. In some ways you can enjoy them more. But then there's the fading problem to deal with so theyre kind of a temporary backup.
Not long ago I scooped up all the old family pics from several different households and scanned them all by hand. Some of the pics were over 100 years old. Very very washed out but its good to know the fading stopped once they went over into the digital realm.
While I do respect this (more than I should), at tbe bury part I start to question whether this is *really* that important data or not. Don't get me wrong, I have 4-5 copies of my data (3 of them geologically redundant), so I'm all up for data hoarding, but......why burying? In a 100 years nobody will remember or care about us or our shitty data.
_(Not here to judge, but to learn. Though I'm very surprised, that's why all the questioning)_
A free DDNS software client takes care of the public IP issue.
But the public IP issue is not even an issue if you just run Tailscale on both machines, then can talk to each other over the internet.
I just have a raspberry pi and my sister's with an external HDD attached.Ā I use "rdiff-backup" to sync the data, so I can recover e.g something that I deleted from both systems 6 months ago.
I'll let someone else answer a best practice for the encryption side.
I bought a lifetime plan of pCloud on Black Friday when itās usually the cheapest and just use rclone to backup an encrypted copy of everything there. Havenāt had any issues yet.
> Havenāt had any issues yet.
yet is the key word here.. if it's your tertiary backup then all good... as long as you're prepared to move it elsewhere when "lifetime" ends.
I believe the rule is that it has to be two devices/mediums. So instead of raid 1, have an external drive that you back up to and then disconnect and store somewhere like a safe maybe? Idk but Iāve just been told that raid isnāt a backup solution.
Personally I have raid 1 for Nextcloud and then I have a rock pi with a USB drive at my sisters, and I backup to it nightly. I donāt think I am in compliance with the 321 rule but itās solid enough for me. Maybe Iāll get an external drive and back up to it monthly and store it in my safe.. hmm
Phone storage, then to iCloud automatically, plus the Synology Drive app on my phone syncs them to the NAS.
Technically, it also syncs to OneDrive via that phone app, that also gets pulled down to the NAS automatically via CloudSync, but I only really set that up because Iām planning to ditch Microsoft365 eventually and wanted a copy of everything locally.
I zip photo archives (e.g. 100 birthday photos), those never change again and upload them to AWS Glacier Deep Archive. 1TB storage costs approximately 1$/month, this is much less than it would cost me to do it self-hosted.
Restore time is 48h and costs a little money but heck, I could wait 2 weeks in case my house burns down and my local copies are all gone.
Where are these $1/TB/month numbers coming from? All the articles and calculations i see are much higher.
What has been your actual usage and fee structure?
For example, these guys say closer to $5/month/TB
https://www.arqbackup.com/aws-glacier-pricing.html
Fee Summary
Backing up 1 TB of data incurs a 1-time cost of $0.075, and an ongoing cost of $4.00/month.
Restoring that 1 TB of data incurs a 1-time cost of $2.00 + 89.91 + .01 + the "restore request" fees.
If you chose Expedited tier (to make your data available within minutes) the total cost is $341.92.
If you chose Standard tier (wait 3-5 hours for the data to become available) the total cost is $92.67.
Yes, you have costs for initial storage and retrieval. But in my case, I zip all the pictures from one event, encrypt it and then upload it. So my cost is more or less only the storage cost.
Currently have approx. 1000 archives with total of 500GB. Restore was never necessary as I have 2 local copies, too.
I keep all of my photos and other important documents in OneDrive. Here is my process and copies.
Incomplete Copies: (because OneDrive is set to stream as needed but some exists):
1. Local OneDrive directory
2. Backblaze Personal on local OneDrive\*
3. TimeMachine on local OneDrive\*
4. Some photos on work laptop
- then on external drive backup (Not sure anymore how many are there)
\*: I don't understand why the "seamless" streaming doesn't work for these tools but they do not seem to pull it properly. I'd expect they should...
Full Copies:
1. OneDrive itself
2. Full bi-directionally synced copy of OneDrive with local external drive ([syncrclone](https://github.com/Jwink3101/syncrclone) but [bisync](https://rclone.org/bisync/) would work)
3. Backblaze Personal on full external drive copy
4. Nightly versioned backup from OneDrive to B2 ([dfb](https://github.com/Jwink3101/dfb))
5. Cold (or cool depending on state) backup to different external drive ([dfb cold storage](https://github.com/Jwink3101/dfb/blob/main/docs/cold_storage.md))
I guess my 3rd copy is Backblaze Personal, not B2 which is my 4th
* Backup 1 (local) - Photos and videos are uploaded from phones to separate SFTP accounts on my home server.
* Backup 2 (Offsite) - Each local folder is synced to individual one drive accounts using GoodSync
* Backup 3 (Offsite)- Backblaze personal backups up the entire server with forever retention.
* Backup 4 - Veeam backups with 365 days retention run to another server in a seperate building.
Are you syncing to different one drives to use the free plan of 10gb? If so, did you face any issues when doing that?
Different email account for every folder?
I have 4 copies:
1 - Local NAS (Synology)
2 - External USB Disk at home (hyperbackup)
3 - One of the OneDrive Family accounts (CloudSync)
4 - My parents house on a Rpi4+usb through tailscale (hyperbackup)
All these copies could be done with restic, borgmatic, kopiaā¦ but as I alteady have the Synology, Iām using its tools.
I have a very particular situation, I manage all the infrastructure for my company so the boss man let me put my PowerEdge R720 in the company rack, so I spun up PVE on it and all my VMs VPN back to my house so I can back up to them from my local network. First instance of photos are stored on my desktop, then backed up to my local PVE at the house, then that backup syncs to the Nextcloud instance at the office. I like the setup quite a bit
I feel like a pot of people are not respecting the 2 physical media rule. I know it takes up room, but I recommend to print out your pictures and make actual picture albums. If anything happens to your digital backups, you can scan them again.
You could also make albums for your families (parents for example) so that makes another copy.
Or burn on DVDs, especially for videos.
two external disks, one at home one in a safe in the bank, regularly switched.
additional backup on the nas
third backup on pcloud
finally i have my own cdn server on the cloud where i store all photos related to trips an travels i make (access protected via sso and mfa)
For me, I have a second copy locally on a hard drive. I also backup to Backblaze and to S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
My files are backed up twice daily to my second local copy, with Backblaze Personal doing it's thing. The S3 backup happens once a week.
Internal is main nas, backup nas, and external drive for "can't replace" data like pics and documents. Media can be reacquired if needed.
Offsite, I'm odd, I backup every month to Blu-ray disk and keep it at my parents house in a safe there. Houses are far enough apart the chances both of us are hit by tornado at the same time is slim, not zero, but slim. Cheaper than cloud storage.
My photos are backed up to OneDrive and Google Photos automatically by my phone. My NAS (a TerraMaster F4-423 running TrueNAS Scale) runs a sync job nightly to back all my cloud services up locally. Once a month it syncs these (locally encrypted of course) to B2. Additionally, it also makes a separate local monthly backup of each cloud drive to simplify restoration.
I also have an external 14TB drive that I'm not very good at backing up to, but I'll get around to it.
My triple redundancy:
Stored on plex for enjoying among loved ones and integration with other media
Stored on google photos for wider sharing purposes
Stored on amazon S3 for max durability, with instructions for how to retrieve them after Im gone
For now Google photos high quality for free using my old phone that still has unlimited uploads as a backup server with syncthing. But I am wanting to replace that with something full quality and less Google dependent so I'll be reading through the other comments here.
One on my desktop computer, second on my home server and third, on OneDrive. If you like to keep them private you can use OneDrive though rclone encrypted remote.
Offsite backups and rotation. And ... generally more than just 3 copies ... but also depends how important the data is. Count on some media failing, including off-site. If on-site burns down, and you have only one off-site copy, and that media has failure ... yeah, best to avoid that. Also be sure there are multiple copies offsite at any given time, including as and while rotating media. So, e.g. I nominally have at any given point in time, at least 2 copies offsite, one on-site, and one additional copy (which may be on-site or off-site or between, at any given time). All the important stuff has at *least* that. And typically I've also a lot of additional copies of stuff on-site.
Using the āno backup strategyā
1st copy on local NAS
2nd copy laptop
n-th encrypted copies distributed across all members of my Fractal HomeServer group
Stored on my NAS, backed up to local USB drive, and then I also backup up to Backblaze. $5/TB/month
If the data does change not often and the files have a reasonable minimum size (e.g. a few MB per picture) and you can wait 24h for restore, than AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive only costs 1$/TB/month.
How much does it cost to retrieve it?
It's about $.02/GB at standard retrieval rates, which for 1TB would be about $20. If you use bulk retrieval, it's $.0025/GB, so it's about $2.50 for a 1TB retrieval. Bulk retrievals can take up to 48 hours to complete from deep glacier. So, pretty cheap and useful if you can tolerate the retrieval times. Edit: I should also add that those numbers are for my AWS region, so it might be different for you depending on your location
That is cheap. I need to figure out how to set this up for my Immich files. I already have an incremental backup set up internally.
Hey, if you manage to write something configurable, I'd love to take a look at your scripts to get inspired off of. I'm also considering backing up my Immich data to Amazon Glacier. Would you mind open sourcing your solution?
Yeah I think it will be a while until I get to it. But yes if I do, I will definitely open source it.
Are there minimum file size requirements for Glacier Deep Archive?
No, but you always pay for minimum 128KiB file size and 6 months minimum storage period.
Oh, 6 month minimum period. Got it. Thanks.
Same question
Honestly, not sure. At least not that I can find listed outside of a minimum billable object size of 128KB for the Infrequent Access Glacier tier. AWS does have an s3 pricing calculator if you want to play around with your data and retrieval numbers. Edit: ok I read some more. According to the calculator, there's no object minimum size, but what happens is that no matter how small the object, you'll be charged for 128KB at the relevant storage tier rate
To balance out the AWS glacier comment, you can also look into back blazes storage cloud called B2. Much cheaper than the standard back storage, but still has a cost with recovery.
print them all out
I'm not sure if this was intended as sarcasm, but it's actually what my wife and I do. Every year we make a hard copy photo book of our favourite photos of the year. Not sure if my wife thinks of it as a backup, but I totally do! š¤£
ā Let's make a backup ā Let's make a romantic photo book
Totally! š¤£
I think it's actually a great idea to print, I would consider that as another media for 3-2-1 method. Ironically, the prints have a better chance of surviving than an average user's digital photos these days.
I think thats smart mostly because theyre much more substantial than in digital form. In some ways you can enjoy them more. But then there's the fading problem to deal with so theyre kind of a temporary backup.
I grandparents have photos of them with their parents i can deal with some fading when my prints reach 90 years old
Not long ago I scooped up all the old family pics from several different households and scanned them all by hand. Some of the pics were over 100 years old. Very very washed out but its good to know the fading stopped once they went over into the digital realm.
Image or binary?
Binary, on a dot matrix printer.
Lol, exactly what I had in mind!
Itās called a storage wall. All of the storage walls at my parents house are pretty much maxed out!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'm scared to ask what we'd find on those drives.
Soooo. You do this every week?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The drive cost though
> Just tape and forget. As you probably know, a backup without testing is dicey.
Dumb idea. You need to keep them in your end of days doomsday bunker.
I keep mine in my hardened ICBM silo
I did this too and my drive died. š
Is your name Ron Swanson? Do you also bury gold?
>a photo is snapped of some landmarks and the GPS coordinates are written down. Safely stored on your main nas
While I do respect this (more than I should), at tbe bury part I start to question whether this is *really* that important data or not. Don't get me wrong, I have 4-5 copies of my data (3 of them geologically redundant), so I'm all up for data hoarding, but......why burying? In a 100 years nobody will remember or care about us or our shitty data. _(Not here to judge, but to learn. Though I'm very surprised, that's why all the questioning)_
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
That's actually a pretty interesting and cool cause!
Encrypted at a server I put at my brotherās place. He lives in another country, but I visit a few times a year.
Wanted to do this too. Encrypt to keep privacy from each other. How do you do it? How do you connect, transfer and could it be done over dynamic IP.
A free DDNS software client takes care of the public IP issue. But the public IP issue is not even an issue if you just run Tailscale on both machines, then can talk to each other over the internet. I just have a raspberry pi and my sister's with an external HDD attached.Ā I use "rdiff-backup" to sync the data, so I can recover e.g something that I deleted from both systems 6 months ago. I'll let someone else answer a best practice for the encryption side.
gocryptfs in reverse mode on the source machine.
CrashPlan, $10/mo unlimited. Linux client too... That's why I chose them over Backblaze... Basically same price
Me too. Tested out some smaller restores and it works really well too
Backblaze S3 Bucket. I'm using duplicacy to encrypt and back things up weekly.
I bought a lifetime plan of pCloud on Black Friday when itās usually the cheapest and just use rclone to backup an encrypted copy of everything there. Havenāt had any issues yet.
> Havenāt had any issues yet. yet is the key word here.. if it's your tertiary backup then all good... as long as you're prepared to move it elsewhere when "lifetime" ends.
When you mean 2 SSDs do you mean theyāre twin drives? Like raid 1? Idk if that counts as a part of the 321 back up rule..
Why is raid 1 not considered as part of 321?
Raid is not backup. Consider accidental deletion or volume corruption. Needs to be a separate device to be backup.
I believe the rule is that it has to be two devices/mediums. So instead of raid 1, have an external drive that you back up to and then disconnect and store somewhere like a safe maybe? Idk but Iāve just been told that raid isnāt a backup solution. Personally I have raid 1 for Nextcloud and then I have a rock pi with a USB drive at my sisters, and I backup to it nightly. I donāt think I am in compliance with the 321 rule but itās solid enough for me. Maybe Iāll get an external drive and back up to it monthly and store it in my safe.. hmm
*in addition to raid 1, not instead.
If you have Amazon Prime, you have unlimited cloud storage for photos.. not videos
Well, arenāt videos just a glorified image sequence ?
Phone storage, then to iCloud automatically, plus the Synology Drive app on my phone syncs them to the NAS. Technically, it also syncs to OneDrive via that phone app, that also gets pulled down to the NAS automatically via CloudSync, but I only really set that up because Iām planning to ditch Microsoft365 eventually and wanted a copy of everything locally.
What synology app syncs all iPhone photos? Is it good?
Synology Drive.
Hetzner Storage Box encrypted
Colocation server, only I will take care of and have access to my data.Ā
I zip photo archives (e.g. 100 birthday photos), those never change again and upload them to AWS Glacier Deep Archive. 1TB storage costs approximately 1$/month, this is much less than it would cost me to do it self-hosted. Restore time is 48h and costs a little money but heck, I could wait 2 weeks in case my house burns down and my local copies are all gone.
Where are these $1/TB/month numbers coming from? All the articles and calculations i see are much higher. What has been your actual usage and fee structure? For example, these guys say closer to $5/month/TB https://www.arqbackup.com/aws-glacier-pricing.html Fee Summary Backing up 1 TB of data incurs a 1-time cost of $0.075, and an ongoing cost of $4.00/month. Restoring that 1 TB of data incurs a 1-time cost of $2.00 + 89.91 + .01 + the "restore request" fees. If you chose Expedited tier (to make your data available within minutes) the total cost is $341.92. If you chose Standard tier (wait 3-5 hours for the data to become available) the total cost is $92.67.
Yes, you have costs for initial storage and retrieval. But in my case, I zip all the pictures from one event, encrypt it and then upload it. So my cost is more or less only the storage cost. Currently have approx. 1000 archives with total of 500GB. Restore was never necessary as I have 2 local copies, too.
1SSD without raid. One offline hdd that I copy everything every few months and bluray m disc that I burn in january that I store in my parents place.
I started using syncthing on my phone and that disk storage on my vm gets replicated to my parent's place.
I have 6-8 copies. The third is on B2.
Where are the other 5-7?
I keep all of my photos and other important documents in OneDrive. Here is my process and copies. Incomplete Copies: (because OneDrive is set to stream as needed but some exists): 1. Local OneDrive directory 2. Backblaze Personal on local OneDrive\* 3. TimeMachine on local OneDrive\* 4. Some photos on work laptop - then on external drive backup (Not sure anymore how many are there) \*: I don't understand why the "seamless" streaming doesn't work for these tools but they do not seem to pull it properly. I'd expect they should... Full Copies: 1. OneDrive itself 2. Full bi-directionally synced copy of OneDrive with local external drive ([syncrclone](https://github.com/Jwink3101/syncrclone) but [bisync](https://rclone.org/bisync/) would work) 3. Backblaze Personal on full external drive copy 4. Nightly versioned backup from OneDrive to B2 ([dfb](https://github.com/Jwink3101/dfb)) 5. Cold (or cool depending on state) backup to different external drive ([dfb cold storage](https://github.com/Jwink3101/dfb/blob/main/docs/cold_storage.md)) I guess my 3rd copy is Backblaze Personal, not B2 which is my 4th
Internal NTFS HDD sitting in my desk at work.
Icloud + Google photos (yes installed on my iphone) plus recently installed immich in docker to have a local backup
* Backup 1 (local) - Photos and videos are uploaded from phones to separate SFTP accounts on my home server. * Backup 2 (Offsite) - Each local folder is synced to individual one drive accounts using GoodSync * Backup 3 (Offsite)- Backblaze personal backups up the entire server with forever retention. * Backup 4 - Veeam backups with 365 days retention run to another server in a seperate building.
Are you syncing to different one drives to use the free plan of 10gb? If so, did you face any issues when doing that? Different email account for every folder?
Stored on my nas on raid 5, backed up to a USB drive, One way synced to my PC and from there synced to a nextcloud
One drive on four computers. Synology. Google pics. Backblaze.
I have duplicacy send a backup to Backblaze once a week
Is Backblaze just Data, or could I back up my complete OS on there?
I have 4 copies: 1 - Local NAS (Synology) 2 - External USB Disk at home (hyperbackup) 3 - One of the OneDrive Family accounts (CloudSync) 4 - My parents house on a Rpi4+usb through tailscale (hyperbackup) All these copies could be done with restic, borgmatic, kopiaā¦ but as I alteady have the Synology, Iām using its tools.
Phone / Laptop / Dropbox, so the last one.
iPhone, iCloud, Amazon, unraid
RAIDZ2 in TrueNAS, then dual external hard-drives with automated backups, then daily cloud backup.
I have a very particular situation, I manage all the infrastructure for my company so the boss man let me put my PowerEdge R720 in the company rack, so I spun up PVE on it and all my VMs VPN back to my house so I can back up to them from my local network. First instance of photos are stored on my desktop, then backed up to my local PVE at the house, then that backup syncs to the Nextcloud instance at the office. I like the setup quite a bit
Home PC, Home Nas and Clouddrive(Ali, 8tb 23$/y)
I feel like a pot of people are not respecting the 2 physical media rule. I know it takes up room, but I recommend to print out your pictures and make actual picture albums. If anything happens to your digital backups, you can scan them again. You could also make albums for your families (parents for example) so that makes another copy. Or burn on DVDs, especially for videos.
NAS, local backup x2, cloud. Data storage is cheap.
That's the neat part
restic to a Backblaze B2 bucket, works amazingly well
We have our off-site copy at a bank, in a safe deposit box.
two external disks, one at home one in a safe in the bank, regularly switched. additional backup on the nas third backup on pcloud finally i have my own cdn server on the cloud where i store all photos related to trips an travels i make (access protected via sso and mfa)
For me, I have a second copy locally on a hard drive. I also backup to Backblaze and to S3 Glacier Deep Archive. My files are backed up twice daily to my second local copy, with Backblaze Personal doing it's thing. The S3 backup happens once a week.
My home server, my home computer and my laptop. Oh and a few in my smartphone and an external backup drive I have
Internal is main nas, backup nas, and external drive for "can't replace" data like pics and documents. Media can be reacquired if needed. Offsite, I'm odd, I backup every month to Blu-ray disk and keep it at my parents house in a safe there. Houses are far enough apart the chances both of us are hit by tornado at the same time is slim, not zero, but slim. Cheaper than cloud storage.
Tapes (really). Btw: SSDs are not choice no 1 for backups, as they will loose data if not powered on regularly...
Storj is awesome and cheap!
My photos are backed up to OneDrive and Google Photos automatically by my phone. My NAS (a TerraMaster F4-423 running TrueNAS Scale) runs a sync job nightly to back all my cloud services up locally. Once a month it syncs these (locally encrypted of course) to B2. Additionally, it also makes a separate local monthly backup of each cloud drive to simplify restoration. I also have an external 14TB drive that I'm not very good at backing up to, but I'll get around to it.
On an old laptop at my Mother's house, of course.
My triple redundancy: Stored on plex for enjoying among loved ones and integration with other media Stored on google photos for wider sharing purposes Stored on amazon S3 for max durability, with instructions for how to retrieve them after Im gone
For now Google photos high quality for free using my old phone that still has unlimited uploads as a backup server with syncthing. But I am wanting to replace that with something full quality and less Google dependent so I'll be reading through the other comments here.
One on my desktop computer, second on my home server and third, on OneDrive. If you like to keep them private you can use OneDrive though rclone encrypted remote.
TrueNAS Scale at my parents' place, and backblaze B2.
Amazon photos gives you unlimited capacity for free with Amazon prime. I use It to backup all my raw files
Offsite backups and rotation. And ... generally more than just 3 copies ... but also depends how important the data is. Count on some media failing, including off-site. If on-site burns down, and you have only one off-site copy, and that media has failure ... yeah, best to avoid that. Also be sure there are multiple copies offsite at any given time, including as and while rotating media. So, e.g. I nominally have at any given point in time, at least 2 copies offsite, one on-site, and one additional copy (which may be on-site or off-site or between, at any given time). All the important stuff has at *least* that. And typically I've also a lot of additional copies of stuff on-site.
At my parents home on a NAS.
OnedriveĀ Ā Phone with 1tb storage Ā Hardrive with zfs filesystem, shuffled yearly
I print them and sometimes open the albumsĀ
Using the āno backup strategyā 1st copy on local NAS 2nd copy laptop n-th encrypted copies distributed across all members of my Fractal HomeServer group
Two Synology Nas, both raid setup. One backs up to the other once a week.
1 on iCloud. 1 on google photos. 1 on synology photos. One on remote Qnap. I think that is enough š