Peer to peer backup w/simple UI? (Sad former Crashplan user)
reddit / selfhosted

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PrivatePilot9 · 2023-11-25 21:32

Long ago I was a crashplan user who utlilized their Peer-To-Peer
offsite backup option to backup my entire system to my hard drive at
their house, and vice versa.   It worked awesome, and gave us both a
true offsite backup solution that worked well.

But they discontinued it a few years back and I never found anything
comparable.

Yes, I know there are convoluted manual options using Rsync and such,
but none of those are an option when the person on the other end isn't
tech savvy, plus without any sort of encryption, well, I don't want my
friend just openly browsing my files, and honestly, I don't want
\*their\* files on my system unencrypted either.

So, is there any options out there that fit these wishlist items?

​

* A decent GUI so the non techsavvy crowd can have a hope of using it
* Mostly set it and forget it, like Backblaze?   I don't care if their
computer is on only once a week or whatever, but when it IS turned on,
I want it to wake up and backup ASAP automatically.
* Encryptes or at least obfuscate things somehow so all my
files/photos/etc are not an open book on the remote HD, and vice
versa.


Thanks all.

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Simplixt · 2023-11-25 22:01

Syncthing or Resilio are perfect for P2P, can enable encryption for
untrusted nodes, and are working great with not-always-on devices.

But in the best case scenario, you would just have a Raspberry Pi at
their router, and don't care if they are tech savvy or not.

Sounds like a really unreliable backup, if the software must run on
the other persons private PC.

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Still-Snow-3743 · 2023-11-26 00:30

If you have a central server which is performing backups, and the
client trusts the server, use syncthing to mirror the files on the
client to the server.

If the client doesn't trust the server, for example you are offering a
backup destination for friends or extended family, then use duplicati
for incremental encrypted backups.

Both options work on both linux and windows.

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PrivatePilot9 · 2023-11-26 19:25

Thanks, I'll look into those.

I'm not insanely worried about reliability as long as it's happening
at least, honestly, once ever 2-4 weeks.

Reality is it's mainly my photo and video library I'm worried about,
about 500 gigs now and increasing.   I have digital photos dating back
to the my very first HP Digital camera back in the late 90's, up to
current day, so mine and my families entire 25+ years are on that
library.     I have a local backup, and 95% of it is on Google Photos
as well (but a lot are downsized there), but I'm a firm believer in
the "2 is 1, 1 is none" thing, and I'm reluctant to consider Google
Photos a genuine backup due to the compression, plus some of my videos
are just too big to backup there to begin with.   Hence why I'm
looking at these solutions where I can just buy a 1tb HD, find a
friend interested in doing the same, and then it's more or less free
offsite backups at that point.

I can't believe nobody has filled this niche since CrashPlan shuttered
this feature.   I'd literally pay good money for a nice cross-platform
plug and play GUI solution like this, and I suspect others would as
well.