What does the 3-2-1 rule look like for you?
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1 backup on a local, Independence disk.
1 backup on a HDD connected to an OpenWRT router at the other end of the house
1 backup on my remote vps.Restic+backrest
Sftp for remote endpoint
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My nas is a second copy of all my data, nothing only exists on the nas. The nas is also is slowly uploading to backblaze, data limits are slowing my progress. My photos which I feel are the least replaceable are automatically backed up to my nas , Google photos, and amazon photos, with manual backup to my desktop, and manual backup to an external hard drive that is stored in a fire resistant box.
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my backup is staring longingly at LTO drives and wishing they would magically be affordable.
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- Daily incremental (and occasionally full) backup to an external HDD - a full image of my PCs, so that I should be able to restore anything back to what it was in the last ~14 days, assuming no ransomware or fire or...
- All the data I care about gets synced to my Nextcloud (VPS, not home lab) - somewhat ransomware protected as I could restore VPS backups independently from my PC.
- Most precious data (mostly photos) gets backed up regularly to an encrypted zip file and then gets send to a glacier tier S3 bucket. Some manual retention is done on the zip file level, so that I can get a tad older backup restored.
- At least monthly a full backup image of my PCs is created on a separate external HDD which is not stored at home, but in a place I could access 24/7 if I really needed to restore something fast.
Phones, etc? Just sync to the mentioned Nextcloud, PC downloads from there and everything gets then into the aforementioned backups.
Homeserver? See "PC" above. With the caveat that some VMs/containers are not in the backup cycle, as they do not store any valuable data besides temp files, etc. For these, only things like docker compose files, custom config, ansible playbooks,... are in my backup.
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I don't think this meets the definition of 3-2-1. Which isn't a problem if it meets your requirements. Hell, I do something similar for my stuff. I have my primary NAS backed up to a secondary NAS. Both have BTRFS snapshots enabled, but the secondary has a longer retention period for snapshots. (One month vs one week). Then I have my secondary NAS mirrored to a NAS at my friends house for an offsite backup.
This is more of a 4-1-1 format.
But 3-2-1 is supposed to be:
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Three total copies of the data. Snapshots don't count here, but the live data does.
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On two different types of media. I.e. one backup on HDD and another on optical media or tape.
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With at least one backup stored off site.
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I use Backblaze B2 for one offsite backup in "the cloud" and have two local HDDs. Using restic with rclone as storage interface, the whole thing is pretty easy.
A cronjob makes daily backups to B2, and once per month I copy the most current snapshot from B2 to my two local HDDs.
I have one planned improvement: Since my server needs programmatic access to B2, malware on it could wipe both the server and B2, leaving me with the potentially one-month old local backups. Therefore I want to run a Raspberry Pi at my parents' place that mirrors the B2 repository daily but is basically air-gapped from the server. Should the B2 repository be wiped, the Raspberry Pi would still retain its snapshots.
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Wow, a lot of variation in this thread!
I get all my data to my server, then from there I have borgmatic do incremental backups to a backup drive on the same machine (nightly cronjob).
From there I use Rclone to get the encrypted borg backup to Backblaze B2 for cloud storage.
So for 3 2 1, my 3 copies are the original, the local backup, and the cloud backup.
My 2 media are local hard drives and cloud storage (I think it's fair to consider this a different kind of media).
And my 1 offsite is the cloud backup.
Now I'm dumb and have a fear of screwing something up so I have also started burning M-Discs of my critical data (everything except TV/movie/music stuff I can redownload). Though this was a lot more expensive than I was expecting, because of aforementioned me being dumb I already screwed up two discs (they are write once). I'm also doing two copies of each disc.
Also I have photos/home videos additionally stored in ente, they are super important to me and I wanted a separated copy someone else is looking after.
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Its an automation software for borg backup to run on a schedule and keep a certain number of backups while deleting old ones etc.
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My one other media type is “the cloud”.
I use hard drives, I can’t imagine trying to put something on a disk or something.
One thing I do recommend, I keep one unencrypted hard drive copy in the safest most hidden part of my house. This is in case encryption software disappears, or I just forget my encryption keys or something.
Other than that, one encrypted copy of files in a thumb drive in my wallet (selected files, not everything). One in my car. One in my firesafe. Then daily cloud backup.
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My main storage is a mirrored pair of HDD. Versioning is handled here.
It Syncthings an "important" folder to a local back up only 1 HDD.
The local Backup Syncthings to my parents house with 1 SSD.
My setup can be better, if I put the versioning on my local backup it'd free space on my main storage. I could migrate to a dedicated backup software, Borg maybe, over syncthing. But Syncthing I knew and understood when I was slapdashing this together. It's a problem for future me.
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@lka1988 @Lem453 Primarily a frontend tool designed to make your life easier, torsion.org/borgmatic , but I tend to avoid macros, frontend scripts, or even GUIs like this. They may obscure Borg-specific configuration details that, hypothetically, could one day hinder your restoration process.
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My day-to-day stuff stays in sync via syncthing on my two laptops, my desktop and my home server. They all run btrfs, so I won't be syncing any flipped bits around.
Home server rsyncs from my VPS once a week. When that's fine, it rsyncs itself over to a hetzner storage over sshfs+gocryptfs.
Four copies at home, one in the cloud.
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4-2-1-1 for me
Two copies at home, synced daily, one of them in an external drive that I like to refer as the emergency grab and run copy lol
One at a family member synced weekly and manually every time I visit.
All of those three copies are always within a 10 kilometer radius in a valley overseen by a volcano so..
One partial copy of the so-critical-would-cry-if-Iost data is synced every few days to a backblaze bucket.
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I didn't consider it as valid, one on (phone and internal nvme1), the second one on nvme2 and the third one in the cloud.
Though I have only two copies of normal data myself, I consider live and cloud to be enough for most data. Everything very important has more backups in other ways (bitwarden has an exportable local version on every logged in device, images are stored in immich on my server making it 3 devices)
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Atm main sys is a ZFS RAIDZ1 on 3 SSDs
Weekly-ish backup onto 1TB external HDD.
Sync encrypted important stuff to Cloud.
Syncthing some stuff to smartphone. -
borgmatic is way too easy and hetzner storage box is way too cheap to have any excuses
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3: RAID-1 pair + manual periodic sync to an external HD, roughly monthly. Databases synced to cloud.
2: external HD is unplugged when not syncing
1: External HD is a rotating pair, swapped in a bank box, roughly quarterly. Bank box costs $45/year.
If the RAID crashes, I lose at most a month. If the house burns down, I lose at most 3 months. Ransomware, unless it's really stealthy, I lose 3 months. If I had ongoing development projects, a month (or 3) would be a lot to lose, and I'd probably switch to weekly syncs and monthly swaps, but for what I actually do - media files, financial and smart-home data, 3 months would not be impossible to recreate.
All of this works because my system is small enough to fit on one HDD. A 3-2-1 system for tens of TB starts to look a lot like an enterprise system.
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