What does the 3-2-1 rule look like for you?
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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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Hm I wonder why snapshots wouldn't satisfy 3. Copies on the same disk like /file, /backup1/file, /backup2/file should satisfy 3. Why wouldn't snapshots be equivalent if 3 doesn't guard against filesystem or hardware failure? Just thinking and curious to see opinion.
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2x 2TB with rsync
2X 500GB with rsync.
1x 1TB cloud drive via rsync
The 2TB has a 500GB dir that gets cloned to the other 2 500GB drives and the cloud.
4 drives, 2 locations (1 offsite)
I could spare 500gb portion somewhere I guess but it's just easy atm that the important 500GB gets copied around 1x a week.
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If I'm reading your example right, I don't think that would satisfy three either. Three copies of the data on the same filesystem or even the same system doesn't satisfy the "three backups" rule. Because the only thing you're really protecting against is maybe user error. I.e. accidental deletion or modification. You're not protecting against filesystem corruption or system failure.
For a (little bit hyperbolic) example, if you put the system that has your live data on it through a wood chipper, could you use one of the other copies to recover your critical data? If yes, it counts. If no, it doesn't.
Snapshots have the same issue, because at the root a snapshot is just an additional copy of the data. There's additional automation, deduplication, and other features baked into the snapshot process but it's basically just a fancy copy function.
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Toss in another drive for RAID5. That way you can at least have some redundancy...
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Currently only have pictures and documents stored, so everything easily fits on 1tb. One copy on my homeserver (unencrypted), one copy on my laptop (Luks encrypted), and one copy with rsync and a raspi at my parents (unencrypted). Might change encryption strategies to all luks.
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It's not important data. Why would I spend another $200+ for another 20TB drive to have redundancy for 1 and 0 I don't care about...
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Fair point.
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My current plan once new migration is completed:
Primary pool - 1x ZFS (couldn't afford redundancy but no different to my RPI server). My goal is to get a few more drives and set up a RAIDZ1/2.
Weekly backup of critical data (eg. nextcloud) from primary pool to a secondary pool. Goal here is to get a mirror but will only be one drive for now.
Weekly upload of secondary pool to hetzner storage box via rsync.
Current server
1x backup to secondary drive (rpi)
1x backup to hetzner storage box via rsync
