Is a cloud backup an acceptable backup for a home server?

The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:

• 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
• 2 different forms of media
• 1 off-site copy

Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.

You guys have backups?

Acceptable for what? What do you, personally, consider an acceptable amount of loss, and time and money spent on recovery?

I don't have any life-or-death critical data, so I have one local backup in case I corrupt my server again. If my house has a fire or flood, or lightning strikes and fries everything, or my stuff gets stolen, that loss is acceptable to me.

Would that be sufficient

No.

3-2-1

Three copies; your working copy, and a cloud copy, and (as an example) on and external HD that you keep at a friend’s house….

On two separate media… so yes cloud can cover that

One off site. So yeah cloud covers that.

Encryption on your off site copies. Yeah I don’t care if they are Linux ISOs or your grandmas recipes. ENCRYPTED

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

I'd say yes for home use that's perfectly fine.

Lots of people here teach you the 3-2-1 rule. Which is how it's supposed to be and stick to that if you're a business or have valuable data... But that's also not the whole picture.

I think more important than the actual number of backups is to make sure they work. I've seen computers where the backup or cloud sync failed and no one noticed. And after the harddisk got damaged they got aware of the fact that the last successful backup ran 9 months ago... Or people started to save things in a different directory and that drive wasn't part of the backup. Or the backup was encrypted and the key got lost together with the original data.

I personally am a bit cheap on the third backup. I replace that with an old external drive and copy my vacation pictures there every half a year or so. Just don't store that next to the computer so everything burns down together. I'd say that's more than enough. And your cloud backup already does 99% of the job. It's at a (physically) different location and does all the really important tasks (for home use.)

Fuck the 3-2-1 rule, I cant afford that. I just have my server and that connects each night to another server at my parents and does an incremental backup via kopia.

Or at least, that is my plan, currently i hook up a 10TB HDD from time to time and do a ZFS send.. but the offsite backup is coming! For sure!

If it is not that much data though, take a look at Backblaze B2. Using that for a client that has a few 100 GBs and it costs about a euro a month currently. Incremental, encrypted, with kopia. But if it is multiple TB it can get real expensive real fast

That depends on if you trust them. Also, would this be your only backup?

It's better than no backup at all, but ideally it shouldn't be your only backup. Still, having any backup puts you ahead of the vast majority of computer users. If the data is truly of value to you, consider also keeping a second backup within your custody and away from your home.

I rotate two encrypted hard drives between work and home, performing a backup monthly and taking the newest backup to work before bringing home the previous.

My general rule with backups is the standard you pretty much hear everywhere: 3-2-1

3 copies of every file you value 2 different media 1 off site

For example, you can have two copies on one drive and a third in the cloud. That way you prevent accidental deletion, bit rot and house fire.

This is a tough one. The problem with local only backups is, what if there's a fire?

I use Amazon Glacier to store my pictures. It's $0.0036 / GB per month, so I pay less than $2/month for ~535 GB of storage that I'm using right now. There is also a cost for downloading, but if I need it, I'm going to be happy to pay it (and the costs aren't crazy). Uploads are free.

(The other problem with Glacier is that it's not really an end-user-friendly experience, nor is it something easily automated. I use SimpleAmazonGlacierUploader, a Java program someone wrote, to do it. You can also upload to S3 and have it archive things to Glacier automatically - I've never tried this but it should work.)

I considered getting my brother or a friend to build two storage servers (with RAID5 or something) that we'd each keep at home, and just sync to each other. Good if you have a friend or family member willing to do it (or at least host your offsite box). Down sides: Cost to build it, time to build and maintain it, cost to replace things that break, plus cost for electricity. I've been using Glacier for many years, so by now maybe I would have spent less on that theoretical backup system, but I also did not have to worry about it.

I'm going to argue that, yeah, probably, but it depends.

Are you at risk of just losing your personal data, or is this hosting services other people upload shit to?

If you've got other people's photos or documents or passwords or whatever, then no. You need more than one backup, you need to automate testing of your backups, and you need to make damn sure that you can absolutely recover from BOTH sets of backups.

If it's just your shit, then you do what you're comfortable with: if you lost your home server and it's backups, then are you okay with that outcome?

If that's a 'no', then you need more than the one backup, and testing, and automation blah blah blah.

I have the live server data, archives on a different drive in the system, and archives uploaded to the cloud.

About once a week or so I burn the local backup files to a BD-R, chuck that in a media-rated fire safe (an aside: a paper-rated fire safe is not sufficient for plastic disks, so make sure you buy one that actually will keep your backups from being melted otherwise, meh, you didn't really do anything).

The cloud versions are on a provider that claims 99.99999% durability, which is good enough, and I keep 60 days of backups in the cloud so that I have enough versions to rotate back through.

I also built a 2nd little baby server that'll grab the backups and do an automated restore and stand up my entire stack once a month, just to verify that the backup archives are actually backups and actually can be downloaded, unarchived, and automatically bring up all the stacks and populate the databases and have everything just appear up and running.

It isn't cost effective. Go for Back blaze or some other backup service

I use backblaze b2 for my storage. I use restic to backup everything to it. It works well and I've had it going for YEARS at this point. For things I could never replaced, like photos, I use external drives in addition to B2. Everyone knows that if something happens and we need to leave to just grab the drive that is stuck to the wall and the family photos will be safe.

My though process goes like this, everything backups to my home server. I have snap shots of the data on a normal basis. So if I need to get something back, going to a snap shot is pretty simple. If for some reason my server(s) just stopped existing for some reason I could pull it back from B2. I've only had to actually restore from B2 a handful of times and it was worth it.