Discussion Backup solution for the digital age ?

[Li Kao]

I don't know where to begin, this promises to be a shambolic ride of a thread that may result in a wet fart with very little replies. But bear with me.

How do you make sense of your digital life ? By that I mean, what's your backup solution, which services are you using, what do you even backup.
Like some, at least I hope so, I more or less failed upward since digital entered our lives. I had backups on CD for which I don't have a drive anymore, I had backups on a HDD that I one day pretty fucked (note to self, be awake, don't force connectors that don't fit), I paid for cheap Crashplan when Crashplan was cheap, I hate-pay for Google Drive, etc.
And this, if you ask me, is a gigantic mess just waiting to crash on me.
So I want to make sense of it all.

I need...

• A password manager.
• Some way to automatically backup my most important files, as in family pics, administrative shit, etc.
• Some way to automatically backup my ebook library, but above all my mother's ebook library. She reads like a demon, I know this is exceptionally important to her.

For the password manager I'm good with Bitwarden, so there's that. But the file backup is not via Google Drive, which is suboptimal in my mind. I already talked about a bug that makes my skin crawls (two pc on one account, notifications that just don't shut up on my end even if I click 'don't show again'), but I guess I could make that work by paying those incompetent fuckers a little more and get a sub for my mother.

• BUT WHAT ABOUT THE REST ?

I get it, the common wisdom, and one I adhered to for years, is that the rest is not that important, that the movies, the digital comics bought on Humble, the music, whatever comes to mind, is not important... ok. But it adds up, with each passing year more data are piled on aging HDD. HDD that will one day croak without warning.

And then wouldn't it be nifty to be able to provide your own content to the apps that use them ? Be it video, books, comics, whatever.
But how ?

Please share your backup wisdom with me.

-

I suppose I should print my master pass for bitwarden.
Buy an affordable NAS with big HDDs, set up some Raid thing.
Backup the NAS on Crashplan (but I read Crashplan is finicky with some NAS brands).
Then stop my sub to Google Drive ?

Any input appreciated.


PS. I looked at server rental prices then promptly washed my eyes with bleach.

 

[FunnyJay]

How about setting up a cloud bucket for storage on one of the major cloud providers? AWS/Google/Azure?
I have no clue about the pricing for that, but you can pretty much upload how you see fit.
Don't know about automatic backups to such buckets, but still...

EDIT:
Here's AWS pricing:

Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service Pricing - Amazon Web Services

Find detailed information on Free Tier, storage pricing, requests and data retrieval pricing, data transfer and transfer acceleration pricing, and data management features pricing options for all classes of S3 cloud storage.

aws.amazon.com

Google Cloud:

Pricing | Cloud Storage | Google Cloud

cloud.google.com

Azure:

https://azure.microsoft.com/sv-se/pricing/details/storage/blobs/

 

[Li Kao]

My immediate reaction was 'but aren't those more geared toward archival purpose and not really suited to frequent retrieval' ? (not that I plan to retrieve anything frequently)
Then I looked at the cheap $/Go and calculated that it wasn't cheap at all in the end.
But you lead me to question my entire logic. It's not well thought out. I talk about archival and content providing, that's putting too much in the equation.
I have to consider the price too, things aren't cheap in these domains.

Soooo... maybe continue using Google Drive. And buy a cheap subs for my mother. It kills me to reward those idiots but being thrown out of your game because some change was made on the backup and GD absolutely had to throw you a notification gets old.
I continue with my sub, she has hers, nice. Backup of the most important files is done.
If GD doesn't decide to stop uploading the files, which it has done to me in the past. But well.

Then if I want to archive a bigger part of my computers, I can buy a NAS with 2-4 HDD bays. I will then be able to, easily or not easily at all depending on the NAS, use Crashplan. Unlimited storage for something like 10$
And I suppose, but then I'm in another can of worms, that the NAS could serve as a content provider.

 

[Le Pertti]

Yeah those rented servers are more for archival and not really good for constant traffic.

I used to do google drive for a few years but since I have gone all apple I have started to use iCloud instead and while I like it more but it is pretty much the same and no point really if you are on PCs. Price is the same either way.

You should consider the NAS thing. Not sure what kind of internet service provider you have? I have Free Fibre and the modem itself can function as a NAS, I just connected a HD to it and it serves as a NAS.

 

[MomoVideo]

If you have a somewhat decent internet speed and availability, consider getting NAS or even setting up a cheap PC/laptop with HDDs attached to it. Configure Hard Disks into RAID 1 so when one of the disks fails, the data will still be safe. You won't be limited by the strange rules of other cloud providers and you can do whatever you want with it. The entry cost of this solution will be steep, but in the long run, it should be worth it.

Personally, I am running an old laptop as a server, because I don't need that much power, and the cost of running it is lower, with an external 4 TB HDD connected to it. It's running on OpenMediaVault (Linux-based OS) 24/7 and now I can't live without it.

I need...

• A password manager.
• Some way to automatically backup my most important files, as in family pics, administrative shit, etc.
• Some way to automatically backup my ebook library, but above all my mother's ebook library. She reads like a demon, I know this is exceptionally important to her.

Not sure about the first one, because I don't know what exactly do you mean by simply saying Password Manager, but the other two can be done with OwnCloud/NextCloud. You can install an agent on a PC and it will scan for changes in specified locations and upload/download files when changes are made.

For ebooks, I'm sure that there might be some applications to enhance the reading experience. If you need a way to sync your ebooks to the server then it sounds to me that you might be getting ebooks from free sources ( I might be wrong here, but no worries, I don't judge). If that is true, then look into readarr, it can automate the ebook experience for you.

 

[Li Kao]

This was really interesting MomoVideo and yeah, the password manager part was useless and confusing, as I say further down that I’m good on that front.

 

[EdwardTivrusky]

Sorry if it's already mentioned but i haven't read the thread fully because busy but just a quick note regarding Cloud Services. Check their retrieval policies.
Many services are cheap until you need to get old data back and then it gets expensive, or that used to be the case.
Data over a certain age is put into "Deep Storage" and the cost for retrieval can get stupid.

Again, i don't know if this is still the case but i suspect it is.

 

[MomoVideo]

Sorry if it's already mentioned but i haven't read the thread fully because busy but just a quick note regarding Cloud Services. Check their retrieval policies.
Many services are cheap until you need to get old data back and then it gets expensive, or that used to be the case.
Data over a certain age is put into "Deep Storage" and the cost for retrieval can get stupid.

Again, i don't know if this is still the case but i suspect it is.

Usually, Cloud Providers offer multiple storage types based on customer needs.

 

[C-Dub]

If it helps, here's some of the tools and apps I use for organising my files and such.

Cloud drive - OneDrive
The big seller for me is it costs £7.99 per month for the family plan, so I can give cloud storage to my mum and my girlfriend, plus they both got Office 365 which saves me a lot of headaches as I don't need to go through explaining LibreOffice (and how it's different to the O365 they use at work) to them.

Photos - iCloud Photos
I pay 79p per month to get iCloud Drive. This is just for my photos and keeping my iPhone and iPad in sync. My general documents storage is with OneDrive as I get a whole 1TB of storage and I use Office 365 for my documents anyway.

Password Manager - Bitwarden
I started off on 1Password, ditched them when they went down the subscription path and tried to bully users into syncing their passwords using their service, and I've instead opted for Bitwarden. It works well, no complaints.

2FA - Authy
Does what I need it to, isn't Google.

NAS - Unraid
I've converted an old PC and some old hard drives into my own super-powered NAS. The breadth of software you can get for Unraid is staggering, and I highly recommend you do this if you have hardware knocking about to do it.

I currently have 14TB of old hard drives on here ranging from 2TB to 8TB in size. I'm planning to replace this hodgepodge with a series of NAS-quality 8TB hard drives over the course of the next 6-8 months, with one of them being my parity drive that will ensure your data is safe should one of the drives in the array fail.

I run a whole bunch of stuff off of Unraid, including a Plex server, a Syncthing server, Home Assistant and HOOBS, and a VPN-enabled torrent-based PVR consisting of Deluge-VPN, Sonarr, Radarr and Prowlarr for downloading stuff.

It all works amazingly well and is very low maintenance.

Local system backup - Unraid share
I've basically created an Unraid share that is setup as a network drive that all my computers back up to, as if it's a connected USB drive. From there I can restore if something goes wrong. Unraid also lets me point a Docker container to the share, so I could in theory use one of the many cloud drive Dockers to just backup whatever lands in that Unraid share for external backup. But since my important files (documents) are all on OneDrive which provides the level of safety I need (basically syncs my documents and provides ransomware protection).

File syncing - Syncthing
This is a P2P file syncing app. I keep a "Master" sync on my Unraid server that is on 24/7, and all my other devices will sync with each other and the Unraid server. You can sync anything you want - what I usually sync is my Download folder (so I can download something on one device with the intent of using it on another), my ROMs and a few other bits and pieces. It's not a backup solution as it only keeps the latest versions of everything, but if you need to keep a folder on one of your computers matched up with a folder on another device, this is great.