Most people realize too late that they didn’t have backups of their data or don’t realize they can easily setup their own media servers at home. What do you use and suggest? Everything from beginner tech knowledge to advance. TIA
I use Backblaze for all offsite backups
Same for me, Backblaze is the shit
Personally I never reached a point where I had to use any kind of storage software. All you need is a good external storage and a little bit of organization.
If anyone is serious about data storage I would honestly choose external SSDs or an enclosure that supports SSDs. I’ve had terrible experiences with hard drives failing over the years or clicking and corrupting my data.
Follow the 3-2-1 rule for all data you would be upset to lose. Having a server (really just any networked computer that can receive and store enough data) is the easiest way to accomplish “1” and “2”. Then encrypt and send that data offsite to either another server you maintain or to the cloud.
Is there a cloud service you recommend?
I recommend treating the cloud service as just a file host for one or more encrypted backup files/directories. If you do that, then you can use a huge range of hosts without worry.
A nice option is ab S3-compatible host. Whatever is reasonably cheap and well-liked. These hosts often allow you to keep two or more “versions” of your backups at free or reduced storage prices, which is a pretty great layer of added redundancy. They are also compatible with a ton of software tools.
I avoid listing the ones I personally use (I actually do 2 offsite copies) for infosec reasons.
- Pictures: On a folder on a server I syncthing to. I don’t really look at them. I used to have NextCloud for browsing them, but it was slow. I might give Immich a try
- Music: Youtube and the songs in my head. Sad, but it’s true. I have a large collection I rarely look at. I also have a rockbox I sometimes pick up and play to rejig my tastes.
- Movies/Tv shows: Kimcartoon was main goto for cartoons, but it’s down now. I use other sites. Movies, usually I find some recommendation on Lemmy and then I go find a nice DCC on an irc server somewhere with irssi. I had JellyFin for a bit, but I just don’t watch movies or series that often.
- Backups: Some in the cloud. Rest in a big old hard drive. Plug it in once a year, update and tidy it up. Power down, back into cold storage.
I have a Nas running nextcloud for general ease of automatically backing up anything important from my phone or pc.
Nextcloud and important things from the server are backed up using a tool called “restic” which honestly does not get enough mention here.
Restic is amazing, it supports just about every cloud storage provider out there - could be Amazon S3 or backblaze, but it could also be OneDrive or Google drive. If you’ve got some cloud storage somewhere, restic will probably support it.
Restic is super clever, it takes snapshots and only backs up any data that has changed - so it’s very space efficient and fast. I back up hourly, it only takes a few mins and if nothing has changed, there cost is also basically nothing. But you can pull back files from any snapshots you keep and when you delete a snapshot, it only deletes data that’s not used by any snapshot.
This means you can have backups going back months or years at very little data cost. You can restore a full backup, or just a specific file if you need.
Seriously, restic is amazing and more people need to know about it.
I’ll have to check it out. Restic sounds interesting.
Definitely do! It’s entirely command line driven, but don’t let that put you off, it’s quite easy to use and well thought out.
If that’s still a concern, there’s also backrest, a project that puts a web UI in front of restic:
I use Onedrive for storing files offsite, and a Synology NAS for onsite. I’ve got my PC as the main source of my files, and use Syncthing to sync to my laptop and NAS, and Onedrive syncing the PC and NAS to the cloud.
I know Onedrive isn’t always popular here, but it does everything I need, and is cheap. It also lets me access my files from my phone
Hard copy.
Photos in a photo album, documents in a filing cabinet.
Okay but like what if your house burns down
It’s good to have some kind of backup for worst case scenariosOtherwise I totally agree. I feel like the only way I’ll actually look at my photos is if they’re physically there for me to see.
This is why I’m scanning in all my old physical photos. It’s great to go through the originals, but if anything was to happen, they’d be gone forever.
What scanner do you use?
It’s an Epson Stylus, 235w I think. I’m not home to check at the moment. It’s not amazing, but it scans at up to either 1200 or 2400 dpi, and I usually use 600 dpi, as that’s more than enough for the typically low quality photos I’ve got.
I’m sticking with it on Windows for now too, as the software can do some corrections with one click, like certain colour corrections. I’ve tried a few Linux packages, and while they’re good, they’re all missing something compared to the Epson Windows software.
I’ve got a beginner 2 bay NAS set up with about 18TB for all my family’s media.
Pictures from our phones are also backed up in Google Photos. Not private at all but it works as an off site option.
I’m all about keeping it simple with a NAS drive at home and cloud backups for that extra peace of mind. Having a local copy is great in case of internet issues, but the cloud is there for when disaster strikes. A mix like that gives you flexibility and quick access for your media needs!
My home server has an NVMe that has the OS and all the Docker Compose stacks and their database data. The big data (photos, movies, backups, etc) are on a big 6 drive RAID 6 array. The NVMe gets backed up to the RAID every night. They go into folders named after the day of the week, so I’ve always got 7 days worth. Then every week or so, I rsync the whole RAID to a big drive at my parent’s house. The reason I do that manually is because I don’t want it happening if I get hit with a ransomware attack.
That was all relatively easy to set up, but server administration is also my profession, so for normal people, I recommend an easier home server setup and a commercial backup solution.
I’m actually working on an open source backup solution based on my deduplicating WebDAV server, Nephele. If I can pull it off, it’ll be free and open source to run on your own hardware, or you can pay my company to back up to my hardware.
ATM
Most of the files are local to my PC
Backed by Veeam to an SMB share.Anything else like videos, music etc. are on my media server
Raid is not a backup!
Double Parity is enough of an backup for files that are not important.
Reason why vacation pics are on my IP >_>
SMB file share, nightly backup for files, monthly backup for entertainment media, both to a RAID 1 18TB backup mount. Important docs also copied to a flash drive that I keep at an off site location, and swap about once a month.
