Hello, so, I have been self-hosting some basic stuff recently, including data storage so i don’t have to rely on external services like google drive.

It’s working fine, but I wondered what would be the best backup solutions in case something unexpected and unfortunate happens (accidentally wipe out everything, drives dying, electrical issues, house burning down, that sort of thing).

I was wondering if more experienced self-hosters had recommendations about that ?

Maybe storing a physical drive in an especially sturdy box ? Perhaps using distant cold storage solutions ? Or even something I have never heard of ?

  • eli@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Your situation sounds like a two server solution for local. So one server for hypervisor/vms and then snapshots and backups go to a separate box like a NAS. As for “house burning down”, a solution for that is off-site backups. I’m guessing building a small TrueNAS server and installing it at a friend’s house or your parents or whatever and then find a backup solution to sync(syncthing may be an answer here for you?).

    I don’t care about my homelab much, but I do care about my family photos. For that I follow my own 3-2-1 where:

    3 copies of my data

    2 copies are local

    1 copy is off-site

    I have a NAS at my house and another NAS at my parents house. They are both linked with syncthing and I do a one-way backup to the other NAS. Now, my parents are a 10 minutes away by car, so I consider that NAS “local”.

    And then I backup my NAS to backblaze for my off-site backup.

    • waterproof@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      So, setting up an entire server might be overkill for the amount of data I truly want to never lose (passwords, some pictures, some important documents, maybe some music if there is space left) , but asking a relative i see every once in a while to just keep a drive or even a USB stick in a desk somewhere is probably the easiest and reliable option.

      Thanks for the suggestion !