
Ask HN: What do you use to backup your personal files in 2019? - BadassFractal
Hey HN,<p>I&#x27;m trying to pick a tool that will require little work on my part, and will safely and affordably backup my personal files. That&#x27;s photos, documents, movies, and all other sorts of stuff I might have accumulated over many years of being a computer user &#x2F; hoarder.<p>The requirements are:<p>* I would store around 10 TB of data, of all types of files, but mostly made of RAW photos.<p>* Everything is in one place<p>* Everything is stored in the cloud, with some pretty high guarantees or the data not being lost<p>Some options I&#x27;ve used &#x2F; considered:<p>* Dropbox - not that much space, but overall pretty convenient, even though it&#x27;s not clear how easy it is to lose files in it if you accidentally delete something<p>* Backblaze - infinite space, but you have to have your external drives plugged in every 30 days to prevent it from deleting those files, which is a hassle<p>* Arq + S3&#x2F;Glacier&#x2F;B2 - more manual effort, and also could get more expensive, e.g. $40&#x2F;mo at 10TB for storage alone. Also experienced some corruption issues in buggy past versions of Arq.<p>Please advise.
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ColinWright
I use four external multi-TB drives, swap them around every couple of days,
and run rsync to copy existing files into a directory with name of the current
date and time, with hard links to the previous backup. This gives a live
current copy of the existing files, but reduces storage requirements by not
duplicating files every time I backup.

Those drives get carried around haphazardly, are often in different physical
locations, and usually only differ in content by at most a week of data.

But I'm odd, happy to write my own scripts, and don't want to trust cloud-
based solutions for my personal data.

By the way, I regularly pull randomly selected files from the backups to test
that they exist and are readable. Backups aren't backups unless you can
restore from them, a lesson I learned the hard way three decades ago.

Also:

* What has changed since you asked this 6 years ago[0]?

* What have you already tried?

* What are you using now?

* What is your experience?

* Why don't the solutions offered there work for you?

* Will you share your experience with us?

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6708474](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6708474)

~~~
BadassFractal
Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I currently use a combination of Backblaze for everything, plus manual
S3/Glacier upload through the aws cli, for only my photo assets, for
redundancy. It's "ok", but not great. Like I mentioned, I'd love something
like a Backblaze, but without the requirement for 30 day syncs.

Your setup is totally respectable, but I'm hoping to find something that's
very much of a one-button set-and-forget vs having to manage anything myself.
Possibly 2 of these services at once, in case one of them craps out and I'm
stuck with no backups.

~~~
ColinWright
Cool ... I've always found it useful to sit and think carefully about what I
want to achieve, what I'm willing to invest (time, effort, and money) up
front, and then what I'm willing to invest on an on-going basis. Everyone has
different requirements and cost/benefit balances.

Hope you find something that better meets your needs, and it would be
interesting if, when you do so, you could write it up and post a link.

Cheers!

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seanlane
I use syncthing to sync photos and videos from my phone, and my wife's, to a
home server. Then gmvault to backup my GMail account locally.

From there, I use restic to make a first copy to an external hard drive, and
then a second copy goes to Backblaze's B2 service, so there's three copies on
two different mediums, with one copy off-site.

It's been rock solid over the past year or two, and the cost is about $2.50/mo
with B2, storing around 450GB. Restic has been bullet proof; when I thought it
was failing, turned out that a stick of faulty RAM was the true culprit.

