i need to do this. bit scared my old laptop will die suddently and all my photos will be lost

never tried 1-2-3 rule of backups ?

(me neither, but i should)

me neither, but i should

Attach a USB hard drive and create a nightly rsync job

Fire or theft and all is gone. Great advice!

It is, actually. It's the first step of a 3-2-1 backup strategy. For most people, this is a massive, huge improvement by itself.

I wouldn't recommend rsync though, better something that can allow you to get back files you deleted before the last backup.

Encrypted hard drive for theft. For fire, I have another backup that I take periodically and put into storage.

That feeling is your cue to do something about it. Don’t let best be the enemy of good. Automatic backups are great, but if you have irreplaceable data that it would pain you to lose, go get an external hard drive and dump it all on that, right now.

Use Arq to send a snapshot to S3 daily, encrypted with a key you keep safe separately.

checkout https://github.com/restic/restic you can automate taking incremental backups and shipping them to another location (e.g S3 bucket) which are encrypted by restic so not even AWS can decode them.

You could setup some lifecycles in the bucket as well to prefer deep glacier storage for the cheapest storage tier

As soon as AI started blowing up I rushed all of my data out of Google and to self hosted. It's obvious they were going to suck it all up in to their training and analyze everything to build a perfect profile on you. They always were but the capabilities are supercharged now.

Immich + Nextcloud + Dawarich behind Tailscale has been a dream. I picked up a second hand HP mini PC for cheap, 3D printed a mini server rack to mount it in with some hard drives.

I just use a wireguard VPN with a domain name I already had and DDNS configured, what benefits does Tailscale bring for a situation where only a couple of devices need access?

It Just Works

Rclone/restic to B2