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Looking for a remote storage provider to use for storing backups
I'm looking for mountable remote storage that I can use for my backup solution at home. I'm trying to get set up with backuppc and need to be able to mount a large remote filesystem to store my archives. I've tried renting a 1TB storage box from Hetzner, but my account was rejected (I assume because of a recent legal name change). Can anybody recommend a similar provider of remote storage that I can rent and mount onto my server?
Backblaze B2 is very cost effective.
You can use a tool such as rclone (Foss) to mount it if you need to browse the files or their web GUI.
May I suggest you also look at Restic if you don't mind a little scripting, or Duplicati which is GUI based.
Restic looks pretty cool, I'll give it a gander! I had a go with B2 earlier in the week, and couldn't get the mounting to work properly via s2fs, which is their recommended solution. To be fair the mounting itself worked, but I couldn't get the file permissions to a point where backuppc would run. I'll take a look at rclone though and see if that helps circumvent the problem.
Restic will natively write to B2 without any hassle. The documentation is excellent and I'm more than happy to send over the PowerShell or Bash scripts that I use for my personal backups (and work as a third backup option, I do love me a backup and I HATE to lose data).
RClone will only daemon mount on Linux and Mac, not on Windows. However, you can mount it in a running cmd window on Windows, just do not close the foreground session window.
Adding on the pile, I used to use Duplicati (on my Windows desktop), but have now switched over to kopia which has seemed to work a bit better. On Linux, I'm still using borg/borgmatic. Both get copied to a local NAS.
But overall, yeah, my off-site backups are B2. I think they charge me like $1.50 every three months or something. It's ridiculous. I don't actually use kopia/borg/etc to push directly to B2 as I feel like no backup utility has gotten "multiple storage backends at once" working, so instead opt to have rclone on a systemd timer on the NAS to push files to B2 on a very frequent basis. Works for me.
Duplicati is not an if but a when on the question of database corruption. Do not trust that software if you care about your data.
Yeah this did me in! Luckily caught it before I needed to restore anything.
I moved over to Duplicacy which is great for deduplication and thinning out older backup revisions without losing any incremental changes. It can also do volume shadow copies on Windows so can backup open files. There's a minor cost for the GUI version which I'm more than happy paying to support the project. The CLI version is free, though I prefer restic for doing server backups.
Also another vote for B2 for the storage backend!
rsync.net is a Hacker News favorite and is rock-solid. You can mount the storage there over sshFS or using their little Windows mapper: https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/windows_map.html
Rsync.net also offers reduced prices for technically proficient customers, who don’t need support.
https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html
There’s also Borgbase which seem to have a good reputation on HN.
I surprised myself and went with dropbox. For 2tb it's only $12/month or $120/year.
This was for full windows machine images which don't dedup very well
I've used rsync's discounted "attic" for years, it's excellent. Very easy to use if you know what you're doing compared to other solutions. I like that it's just a filesystem, so you're not locked into a particular rclone backend or anything like that.
Came here to mention rsync.net and add that their FS is ZFS so you get snapshots for "free". Buying annual saves a bit as well.
I saw a post on r/datahoarder I think where someone took a lunch box, cut a hole for power, put a raspberry pi and hard drive inside, preconfigured their parents' wifi, and shipped it to their parents to plug in. This keeps the data in trusted hands, as well as being comparatively cheap (this will be ~three times cheaper per TB per year than the best commercial solution I could find, even if you pay for the electricity and internet use proportionally). Of course, that's only if you really mean it to be a backup rather than the primary copy, as the described setup has no redundancy (I have a local backup against disk failure, and an off-site pi+disk against fire/theft, and 3 copies seems ok for my risk profile).
That's... actually a really good idea. I might cost it out to see how much it would cost to set up, as I don't have any of the spare hardware to build it.
I'm in the process of building redundancy into my setup as well, but my lab is currently cobbled together from old bits of paper and elastic bands. I'm planning to get a RAID configuration up and running when I have the money for extra drives, but for now I just need to alleviate my paranoia at not having any kind of copy of all my data.
Oh yeah, don't I know it! We've had a lot of nightmares at work with clients replacing disks in RAID arrays only for the remaining original to go down a few days after the first failure! My plan is to have RAID 5 (or 6 if I can afford the storage) on the server for increased redundancy, and also to back everything up to an offsite location in case of a disaster. From what I've seen in the news, RPis should be getting easier to acquire again, but the up front cost of this approach is probably prohibitive at this time.
If you’re wanting to backup your home pc, DIY Perks did a good video on how to do it. https://youtu.be/BZnljKjJLvM
If you’re wanting cloud storage, and have a spare laptop, pi, etc., you can set up a Plex server in your home.
I gave this a quick skim watch, and it looks cool, but not necessarily what I'm after. I prefer an automated, enterprise-grade solution that I can learn thoroughly and then stick on my CV when I next start job hunting. I'm planning a local backup as well, but in the event the house burned down, anything local would be lost, so something offsite is essential to be resilient :)
I was using https://www.idrive.com/pricing for my Plex server till I got everything in a list.
pCloud has a number of “lifetime” plans which may or may not be cost effective over whatever lifetime you use the storage. But it’s an interesting model. I generally like the service as well.
Lots of great options here already, but something a little different: Scaleway S3-compatible Object Storage
I specifically mention Scaleway as they give you 75 GB for free every month, and the costs are very reasonable over that amount.
I use borg and restic with https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
B2 is pretty good.
Wasabi is also good and slightly cheaper, but they have a 90 day timed deleted storage charge.
But I think hard drive pricing has come down and cloud pricing has gone up.
For example wasabi is $6/tb/month. 4TB wd red+ are $105.
You can just do backups via usb.
I bought a 10TB WD SSD for like $300. One-time charge and I'm pretty sure it will pay for itself.
The best fully encrypted one I have found but still a good price is Sync. They’re blind to what you store so you don’t have worry if you have private files.
https://www.sync.com/
I've used arweave (lifetime) and filecoin (monthly) but looking into shadow drive now since it claims to be magnitudes cheaper than both (~$2.3 per 100 GB) https://sdrive.app/stats