Selfhosted

I use asustor Nas, one at my house south east US, one at my sister's house northeast us. The asus os takes care of the backup every night. It's not cheap but if you want it done right.

Both run 4 drives in raid 5. Pictures backup to the hdd and a raid 1 set of nvme in the nas. The rest is just movies and TV shows for plex so I don't really care about those. The pictures are the main thing. I feel like that's as safe I can be.

I'm just skipping that. How am I going to backup 48TB on an off-site backup?!

Hetzner Storagebox

I use syncthing to push data offsite encrypted and with staggered versioning, to a tiny ITX box I run at family member's house

My dad and I each have Synology NAS. We do a hyper sync backup from one to the other. I back up to his and vice versa. I also use syncthing to backup my plex media so he can mount it locally on his plex server.

NAS at the parents’ house. Restic nightly job, with some plumbing scripts to automate it sensibly.

There's some really good options in this thread, just remember that whatever you pick. Unless you test your backups, they are as good as not existing.

Syncthing to a pi at my parents place.

I just rsync it once in a while to a home server running in my dad’s house. I want it done manually in a “pull” direction rather than a “push” in case I ever get hit with ransomware.

Put brand new drive into system, begin clone

When clone is done, pull drive out and place in a cardboard box

Take that box to my off-site storage (neighbors house) and bury it

(In truth I couldn't afford to get to the 1 off-site in time and have potentially tragically lost almost 4TB of data that, while replacable, will take time because I don't fucking remember what I even had lol. Gonna take the drives to a specialist tho cuz I think the plates are fine and it's the actual reading mechanism that's busted)

Cloud is kind of the default these days but given you’re on this community, I’m guessing you want to keep third parties out of it.

Traditionally, at least in the video editing world, we would keep LTO or some other format offsite and pay for housing it or if you have multiple locations available to you just have those drives shipped back-and-forth as they are updated at regular intervals.

I don’t know what you really have access to or what you’re willing to compromise on so it’s kind of hard to answer the question to be honest. Lots of ways to do it

I use borg backup. It, and another tool called restic, are meant for creating encrypted backups. Further, it can create backups regularly and only backup differences. This means you could take a daily backup without making new copies of your entire library. They also allow you to, as part of compressing and encrypting, make a backup to a remote machine over ssh. I think you should start with either of those.

One provider thats built for being a cloud backup is borgbase. It can be a location you backup a borg (or restic I think) repository. There are others that are made to be easily accessed with these backup tools.

Lastly, I'll mention that borg handles making a backup, but doesn't handle the scheduling. Borgmatic is another tool that, given a yml configuration file, will perform the borgbackup commands on a schedule with the defined arguments. You could also use something like systemd/cron to run a schedule.

Personally, I use borgbackup configured in NixOS (which makes the systemd units for making daily backups) and I back up to a different computer in my house and to borgbase. I have 3 copies, 1 cloud and 2 in my home.

Rclone to dropbox. ( was cheapest for 2tb at the time )

Idrive has built in local encryption you can enable.

so if any questions here seem dumb

Not dumb. I say the same, but I have a severe inferiority complex and imposter syndrome. Most artists do.

1 local backup 1 cloud back up 1 offsite backup to my tiny house at the lake.

I use Synchthing.

I used to say restic and b2; lately, the b2 part has become more iffy, because of scuttlebutt, but for now it's still my offsite and will remain so until and unless the situation resolves unfavorably.

Restic is the core. It supports multiple cloud providers, making configuration and use trivial. It encrypts before sending, so the destination never has access to unencrypted blobs. It does incremental backups, and supports FUSE vfs mounting of backups, making accessing historical versions of individual files extremely easy. It's OSS, and a single binary executable; IMHO it's at the top of its class, commercial or OSS.

B2 has been very good to me, and is a clear winner for this is case: writes and space are pennies a month, and it only gets more expensive if you're doing a lot of reads. The UI is straightforward and easy to use, the API is good; if it weren't for their recent legal and financial drama, I'd still unreservedly recommend them. As it is, you'd have you evaluate it yourself.

Next to paying for cloud storage, I know people who store an external hdd at their parent's or with friends. I don't do the whole backup thing for all the recorded TV shows and ripped bluerays... If my house burns down, they're gone. But that makes the amount of data a bit more manageable. And I can replace those. I currently don't have a good strategy. My data is somewhat scattered between my laptop, the NAS, an external hdd which is in a different room but not off-site, one cheap virtual server I pay for and critical things like the password manager are synced to the phone as well. Main thing I'm worried about is one of the mobile devices getting stolen so I focus on having that backed up to the NAS or synced to Nextcloud. But I should work on a solid strategy in case something happens to the NAS.

I don't think the software is a big issue. We got several good backup tools which can do incremental or full backups, schedules, encryption and whatever someone might need for backups.

My ratchet way of doing it is Backblaze. There is a docker container that lets you run the unlimited personal plan on Linux by emulating a windows environment. They let you set an encryption key so that they can’t access your data.

I’m sure there are a lot more professional and secure ways to do it, but my way is cheap, easy, and works.

I rsync a copy of it to a friends house every night. It's straight forward, simple and free.

As others have said, use tools like borg and restic.

Shop around for cloud storage with good pricing for your use-case. Many charge for different usage patterns, like restoring data or uploading.

Check out storj.io, I like their pricing - they charge for downloading/restore (IIRC), and I figure that's a cost I can live with if I need to restore.

Otherwise I keep 3 local copies of data:

1 is live, and backed up to storj.io

2 is mirrored from 1 every other week

3 is mirrored from 1 every other week, opposite 2

This works for my use-case, where I'm concerned about local failures and mistakes (and don't trust my local stores enough to use a backup tool), but my data doesn't change a lot in a week. If I were to lose 1 week of changes, it would be a minor issue. And I'm trusting my cloud backup to be good (I do test it quarterly, and do a single file restore test monthly).

This isn't an ideal (or even recommended approach), just works with the storages I currently have, and my level of trust of them.

Right now I sneaker net it. I stash a luks encrypted drive in my locker at work and bring it home once a week or so to update the backup.

At some point I'm going to set up a RPI at a friend's house, but that's down the road a bit.

External drives that I keep in my office at work. Also cloud storage.

I use rsync.net

It's not the lowest price, but I like the flexibility of access.

For instance, I was able to run rclone on their servers to do a direct copy from OneDrive to rsync.net, 400Gb without having to go through my connection.

I can mount backups with sshfs if I want to, including the daily zfs snapshots.

I have a rpi4 awith an external hdd at my parents house, which I connect via a wireguard vpn, mount and decrypt the external hdd and then it triggers a restic backup to a restic-rest server as append only.

The whole thing is done via a python script

I chose the rest-server because it allows "append only", so the data can't be deleted easily from my side of the vpn.

A huge tape archive in a mountain. It's pretty standard for geophysical data. I have some (encrypted) personal stuff on a few tapes there.

I spend my days working on a MacBook, and have several old external USB drives duplicating my important files, live, off my server (Unraid) via Resilio to my MacBook (yes I know syncthing exists, but Resilio is easier). My off-site backups are to a Hetzner Storage Box using Duplicacy which is amazing and supports encrypted snapshots (a cheap GUI alternative to Borgbackup).

So for me, Resilio and Duplicacy.