Re:Ask HN: What's your approach to personal data archiving a...
by zaptheimpaler on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:38AM
(#28525496)
I have scripts to do two things:
1. Use rsync to backup everything to a Synology NAS every day
2. Backup from the NAS to tarsnap (cloud service with cheap, encrypted backups) every few weeks.
Theres only a few important
ideas and a whole lot of ways to accomplish them:
1. Backup frequency and retention policies. I forgot the term for this, but you want something that prioritizes more frequent backups for nearer term data. For example, see the Apple Time Machine backup policy:
"hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month until the volume runs out of space"
2. Don't micro optimize decisions like which hard drive is most reliable. It's a waste of time and ultimately any drive can fail, the filesystem on that drive can fail etc. Instead, use backups. RAID gives you disk-level redundancy, and an extra backup on the cloud will almost never fail because they have pros making sure of that.
3. A backup you haven't tested restoring from is NOT a backup.
1. Use rsync to backup everything to a Synology NAS every day
2. Backup from the NAS to tarsnap (cloud service with cheap, encrypted backups) every few weeks.
Theres only a few important ideas and a whole lot of ways to accomplish them:
1. Backup frequency and retention policies. I forgot the term for this, but you want something that prioritizes more frequent backups for nearer term data. For example, see the Apple Time Machine backup policy:
"hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month until the volume runs out of space"
2. Don't micro optimize decisions like which hard drive is most reliable. It's a waste of time and ultimately any drive can fail, the filesystem on that drive can fail etc. Instead, use backups. RAID gives you disk-level redundancy, and an extra backup on the cloud will almost never fail because they have pros making sure of that.
3. A backup you haven't tested restoring from is NOT a backup.