I am currently hosting Nextcloud on Linode using the AIO Docker container. I am very happy with how this works, but the running costs is more than I would like to spend on this. I am running a 4 GB Linode (anything less would cause severe lag in the Web UI), with 2x100GB block storage (one for data and one for the Borg backup). In addition, I pay to maintain backup images of the server itself.

So I’ve been meaning to self-host this on a server at home instead, especially as I am looking to upgrade my media station to something more gaming friendly, freeing up a perfectly good mini-PC to host Nextcloud and other services. I’ve told myself that I am waiting for the Linux client of Proton Drive to arrive, so that I can utilize my 500 GB storage there to keep a synced copy of the Borg backup repo. I am not sure I am willing to wait for this anymore (who knows when that will be ready?), and thought that maybe something like filen.io could be used in the mean-time, as I could get 200 GB there for €2/month. But I am open to other solutions as well.

So here’s the actual question: how would I best make sure I keep the backup repo safe so that I could restore it later if something went wrong? What would the ideal setup look like, including local and remote copies?

  • qaz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Why do you want to use an E2E storage solution for backups? You could use something like Backblaze ($0.005 / GB) and encrypt/decrypt the backups locally.

    • cyberwolfieOP
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      1 year ago

      Not a requirement that it is E2EE, as the Borg repo is already encrypted. Guess my knowledge of these services is biased towards E2EE from previous research for use cases where that was a requirement.

      Thanks for the tip, hadn’t hard about Backblaze before. Very reasonable pricing. Would a good strategy then be to schedule rclone to have it synced, or are there other ways that would be better?

      • qaz@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I was looking into the same issue myself too. I’m currently using a managed Nextcloud instance but was hoping to self-host it.

        Backing up container volumes and configs seems like such a common problem, but surprisingly I haven’t found a dedicated solution. I’ve considered borg, but restic seems like the best option so far. It can use any rclone backend, stores the data encrypted, and has snapshot support with deduplication.

        Keep in mind that Backblaze does charge for downloading, modifying, uploading, and other file actions. If you don’t want to pay for traffic you could also use a Hetzner storage box (1 TiB ~€4/m) with its dedicated restic backend.

        • cyberwolfieOP
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          1 year ago

          Hm, after the initial upload, it shouldn’t really generate much traffic if I can only manage to upload the diff, so it might not be much of an issue for me. I am not yet really familiar with tools like rsync and rclone, and also don’t know how the changes are stored in the Borg repo (e.g. if I move a 1 GB file from one folder to another, does that get picked up as a 1 GB change by the syncing tools?), so I would need to do some more research to see if that would be achievable.

          Hetzner also looks nicely priced, but it would’ve been nice if I could choose an even cheaper tier with less storage, as 1 TB is quite overkill for this particular use case. I could of course use it to backup other things.

  • Naate@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’m in the same boat, actually. I’m hosting at home, but want to set up off-site backups, and am looking for something cheap and reliable.

    As for the actual process, rsync is probably the best method. I just need to find a good host

      • Naate@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Just a cheap and reliable bucket to rsync my local backups to. I’m leaning toward Hetzner, but was checking out filen after your suggestion, too.

        An over-complicated solution I was tossing around with some friends was to set up a cheap NAS at our respective homes, and just rsync to one another. Then we can just sneakernet the drives if we need a recovery.