Hi all, I’m just getting my feet wet in self hosting and have a plan to start with Nextcloud on a Pi 4 for photo backups, and then try other things for calendar, phone backups, media hosting, etc.
One thing I worry about is losing my data. I have heard “if it’s not backed up in two locations, it’s not backed up.” I’m curious what all of you do for backing up the setup. Remote backup to hard drives in the garage? Pay for cloud backup and encrypt it? Just another backup site over wifi in the house?
I’d be most afraid of losing photos and if there were a house fire or something. So my inital thought was a way of backing up to a server in my detached garage in a weather resistent container, but I want to know what you all think. Thanks for any insight.
I’d recommend using a job monitoring service that will alerts you if it doesn’t get a check in. It’s very useful if your backups fail silently or hang mid-job for some reason.
I use https://healthchecks.io/ since it has a free tier and it works well.
Or setting proper mail support on everything so you get an email with full output whenever something fails. Ubuntu’s postfix doc is really good.
That works but there are times where a machine/service dies completely or hangs mid-process for a couple of days. You can account for a lot of those cases, but having a separate system that just looks for success rather than monitoring for failure works betters in my experience.
Or if you just want notifications, ntfy is really nice and selfhostable.