[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What's your approach to personal data archiv...
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       Ask HN: What's your approach to personal data archiving and
       backups?
        
       I'm currently just relying on cloud services to backup data but I'm
       thinking it's time to start using some offline solution both to
       avoid the risk of account lockout and to avoid having to trust
       third parties with sensitive data.  I often see comments on HN
       which favor self-hosting and personal data management over use of
       cloud services, so I'm curious what approach people here take.
       I've only just started doing the research for this, but my plan so
       far is just to buy a couple high capacity hard disk drives which
       would be mirrors of each other. Occasionally I'd copy files over
       from my computer to one of the drives and occasionally I'd mirror
       the data on one drive to the other. Also wondering if I should just
       re-use some existing 2.5" drives I have from old laptops or if it's
       more prudent to purchase a new drive that might be manufactured
       with long-term durability / stability in mind.
        
       Author : monroewalker
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2021-09-13 21:05 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
       | HWR_14 wrote:
       | Subquestion:
       | 
       | Does anyone have any good tools to pull (hopefully backed up)
       | data off of failing disks?
       | 
       | What about imaging disks that are in filesystems your computer
       | cannot read?
       | 
       | Ideally, these would be crossplatform, but suggestions across
       | OSes would also work.
        
       | kkielhofner wrote:
       | I have a machine with two 6TB RAID 1 arrays. I have a backup
       | script that runs rsync against a bunch of hosts periodically to
       | one array. Then, weekly I run borg backup from one array to the
       | other. Between borg compression and deduplication I have months
       | of backups on the backup array.
       | 
       | Then at least once a month I bring in an offsite 6TB USB drive
       | and rsync the borg backup to it after manually reviewing that the
       | current borg backups are "sane".
       | 
       | The main advantage to this approach is that even with complete
       | physical destruction I can access/restore anything within hours.
       | Additionally, going back to old versions or checkpoints locally
       | is extremely fast (seconds to minutes) no matter the file size. I
       | also have occasions where I create/change a lot of data in the
       | same day, to the point where a former overnight cloud backup
       | process would occasionally fail to run because it was still
       | running from the night before!
        
       | NKosmatos wrote:
       | A good approach is to use the 3-2-1 backup strategy. You should
       | have 3 copies of your data (1 working set and 2 backup copies) on
       | 2 different media (disk, dvd, NAS, cloud...) with 1 copy off-site
       | for disaster recovery (cloud, external disk at another
       | location...). Depending on the type of data, on how paranoid you
       | are and the budget available you could do extra variations. i.e.
       | 4 set of data, different filesystem (NTFS, exFAT, btrfs, ZFS,
       | ext4...), different disk manufacturers, different batches of hard
       | disks, different NAS enclosures, different methods (soft RAID,
       | H/W RAID, error correction...), encryption and storage in friends
       | house and so on :-) If you can afford it buy a dual disk NAS and
       | also use your spare 2.5 disks in external usb cases and
       | synchronize your data every once in a while.
        
       | wingineer wrote:
       | Redundancy is your friend. If you are serious about data
       | retention, you should be storing your most important data
       | offsite. If you are serious about privacy, this may require
       | backing up to a hard drive and physically storing that offsite
       | yourself.
        
       | alxjsn wrote:
       | I use Seafile, but that's not really important since you can use
       | any other Dropbox style app. Although, everything is stored on
       | ZFS locally in a RAID-Z2 configuration with native ZFS
       | encryption. I can lose up to two drives out of six in my setup
       | with no data loss. Then I take snapshots automatically and push
       | incremental updates to a third-party server and since they are
       | encrypted they can't read the data either.
        
       | runjake wrote:
       | 3-2-1.
       | 
       | Time Machine (USB hard drive), NAS (Synology) and the cloud
       | (Backblaze).
        
       | whoisjohnkid wrote:
       | I encrypt stuff and just keep it in various cloud storage
       | solutions. I wrote my own encryption program in Golang using a
       | combination of scrypt, aes and gcm
        
       | Buttons840 wrote:
       | For now I just rclone (https://rclone.org/) a few directories to
       | B2 or S3. I created an application key with write only permission
       | to the cloud storage.
        
       | p0d wrote:
       | I've been using a raspberry 3 for a long time with an encrypted
       | usb drive for storage. Like the other commenter the pi also syncs
       | the drive to the cloud using rclone.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-13 23:02 UTC)