I have a home server that I’m using and hosting files on it. I’m worried about it breaking and loosing access to the files. So what method do you use to backup everything?
On hope
The “small to medium business” route I see!
And using the fact that raid is a backup!
This guy is rawdogging his RPi, just like me
Me too! Actual servers are docker-compose which is on git but the data…yeah that’s on hope hahaha
This is the way.
Backblaze on a B2 account. 0.005$ per gb. You pay for the storage you use. You pay for when you need to download your backup.
On my truenas server, it’s easy as pie to setup and easy as 🥧 to restore a backup when needed.
I’ll add to this that restic works amazingly with Backblaze. Plus a dozen or so other backup options.
I also recommend B2, it’s an S3 compatible service so any backup software/scripts/plugins that work with S3 should work with Backblaze.
Maybe I’m stupid, but what is B2? A Backblaze product?
Yes it’s their cloud storage.
I didn’t realize they did anything other than that!
They always had a personal backup product for windows. I use it to back up almost 2 TB of files on my desktop PC for a flat rate. It’s pretty convenient because it’s almost fully set & forget.
I think they had some form of cloud computing at some point but they now focus on B2 and some backup tools that utilize B2.
B2 is awesome. I have Duplicati set up on OpenMediaVault to backup my OS nightly to B2 (as well as a local copy to the HDD).
You guys back up your server?
If your data is replaceable, there’s not much point unless it’s a long wait or high cost to get it back. It’s why I don’t have many backups.
In the 20 years that I’ve been running a home server I’ve never had anything more than a failed disk in the array which didn’t cause any data loss.
I do have backups since it’s a good practice and also because it familiarizes me with the software and processes as they change and update so my skillset is always fresh for work purposes.
If you need to back up less than 10 GB, you can back up your data to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage for free with their
b2 sync
command. I use this in acron
job daily or hourly, depending on the data being backed up.Restic to b2. Works great. I’ve also used duplicati in the past to b2 as well.
Same setup here. I’ve got a really basic script running nightly from cron. B2 is cheap as, and having an encrypted backup that’s versioned is great for piece of mind.
At one point I was away from home and my (little rpi) server wasn’t accessible, but with the restic repo up on B2 I was able to easily find a file I urgently needed remotely. It’s awesome.
Proxmox Backup Server. It’s life-changing. I back up every night and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve completely messed something up only to revert it in a matter of minutes to the nightly backup. You need a separate machine running it–something that kept me from doing it for the longest time–but it is 100% worth it.
I back that up to Backblaze B2 (using Duplicati currently, but I’m going to switch to Kopia), but thankfully I haven’t had to use that, yet.
PBS backs up the host as well, right? Shame Veeam won’t add Proxmox support. I really only backup my VMs and some basic configs
Veeam has been pretty good for my HyperV VMs, but I do wish I could find something a bit better. I’ve been hearing a lot about Proxmox lately. I wonder if it’s worth switching to. I’m a MS guy myself so I just used what I know.
Veeam can’t backup Proxmox on hypervisor level, only HyperV and VMWare
PBS only backs up the VMs and containers, not the host. That being said, the Proxmox host is super-easy to install and the VMs and containers all carry over, even if you, for example, botch an upgrade (ask me how I know…)
Then what’s the purpose over just setting up the built in snapshot backup tool, that unlike PBS can natively back up onto an SMB network share?
I’m not super familiar with how snapshots work, but that seems like a good solution. As I remember, what pushed me to PBS was the ability to make incremental backups to keep them from eating up storage space, which I’m not sure is possible with just the snapshots in Proxmox. I could be wrong, though.
You are right about the snapshots yeah. The built in backup doesn’t seem to do incremental backups.
ITT: lots of the usual paranoid overkill. If you do
rsync
with the--backup
switch to a remote box or a VPS, that will cover all bases in the real world. The probability of losing anything is close to 0.The more serious risk is discovering that something broke 3 weeks ago and the backups were not happening. So you need to make sure you are getting some kind of notification when the script completes successfully.
While I don’t agree that using something like restic is overkill you are very right that backup process monitoring is very overlooked. And recovering with the backup system of your choice is too.
I let my jenkins run the backup jobs as I have it running anyways for development tasks. When a job fails it notifies me immediately via email and I can also manually check in the web ui how the backup went.
I am lucky enough to have a second physical location to store a second computer, with effectively free internet access (as long as the data volume is low, under about 1TB/month.)
I use the ZFS file system for my storage pool, so backups are as easy as a few commands in a script triggered every few hours, that takes a ZFS snapshot and tosses it to my second computer via SSH.
cronjobs with rsync to a Synology NAS and then to Synology’s cloud backup.
So what method do you use to backup everything?
Depends on what OS that server is running. Windows, Unraid, Linux, NAS (like Synology or QNAP), etc.
There are a bazillion different ways to back up your data but it almost always starts with “how is your data being hosted/served?”
The simplicity of containerized setup:
- docker-compose and kubernetes yaml files are preserved in a git repo
- nightly cron to create database dumps
- nightly cron to run rsync to backup data volumes and database dumps to rsync.net
Borgbackup
Hourly backups with Borg, nightly syncs to B2. I’ve been playing around with zfs snapshots also, but I don’t rely on them yet
I run everything in docker. I have an ansible playbook that backs up all the docker volumes to a minio server I’m running on a separate machine. I periodically upload backups to idrivee2 with the same playbook
I use Duplicati and backup server to both another PC and the cloud. Unlike a lot of data hoarders I take a pretty minimalist approach to only backing up core (mostly docker) configs and OS installation.
I have media lists but to me all that content is ephemeral and easily re-acquired so I don’t include it.
Duplicati is great in many ways but it’s still considered as being in beta by it’s developers. I would not trust it if the data you back up is extremely important to you.