12
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Is this backup solution fine?
I decided to set up automatic backup of my files from my phone and laptop to Backblaze B2. I didn't find a good solution to sync photos from my phone directly to Backblaze, so I decided to do the following:
- Sync photos from my phone to my laptop using Syncthing
- Back up those photos as well as other files from the laptop to Backblaze using Restic
Is this backup solution fine, or are there any issues with it?
Also, most of the stuff I need to back up, even on my laptop, are photos/videos. Is there a point in using Restic with it's deduplication and incremental backups for this use case, or should I just use Rclone directly? I'd assume deduplication won't save me much storage because photos generally don't have similar byte chunks, although I may be wrong.
Sounds as reasonable as anything to me. Backblaze’s consumer product is also pretty good and may be an option? It works out cheaper if you’re storing more than 1TB or so, but I can understand paying extra to use B2 for an open source workflow you control, and B2 is a no brainier if you have less data.
I’d stick with restic over just plain rclone if I were you, it’s primarily a backup tool rather than a file transfer tool that does backup, if that makes sense. Even if the dedupe between files isn’t especially useful for your data, I’d say point in time snapshots are a deal breaker for a backup tool - and that’s just the first thing that comes to mind, I imagine there are more that the devs have thought of and I haven’t!
Oh, no, I'm currently storing much less. I backed up up almost all of my important data today, and turns out that I only have about 40 GB of data, half of which is my phone gallery. This means that I'm currently able to use Backblaze for an incredible price of $0.00.
I also think controlling the workflow is important for me. I decided to use autorestic as a wrapper around Restic, but I like the fact that I can switch to any other tool whenever I want (obviously, I'll need to create a new backup because of encryption, but at least it's possible)
I want to eventually get a Synology NAS or something like that and use it as self-hosted cloud storage (I've used Nextcloud for a while, didn't really like it), and then set up daily backups from that NAS to Backblaze. That'd be more convenient than syncing my entire phone gallery to my laptop, and it will also allow me to easily access any of that data on demand like with regular cloud storage. It'll also mean that I have a 3-2-1 backup, or at least I think so, I've seen people say that cloud doesn't count as backup, not sure why.
For now though, I'll use the workflow described in the post. I still have to figure out a way to reliably run daily backups, because I currently use systemd+autorestic to make a backup every day at 22:00, but I'm not sure what would happen if my laptop would be turned off at that time.
B2 pricing is $0.005/GB/Month for storage. So you should be charged 20c a month. Do they waive fees under a threshold?
Unless it has changed the first 10GB are free, which still means OP should be paying something, though still very minimal.
Ok cool. Not trying to be pedantic, just trying to understand pricing structure better
I'm not sure, but it does say "$0.00" on both the billing page and the storage usage page
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218514337-Understanding-the-B2-Billing-Page
In your case it would take two days to accrue $0.01, and four months to cross the $0.50 minimum billing amount.
sounds good...but remember that backups are only as good as the tests of the restore procedure. I'd recommend doing a test restore of a backup onto your laptop and verifying the restored files are readable.
this is correct, but there's still other benefits to restic over rclone:
if you re-organize the pictures (for example, to move all the pictures from a vacation into their own folder) restic will notice that automatically and not waste bandwidth uploading the moved file, it will just store a pointer saying "this file has the same contents as this one that was already backed up".
rclone, used the same way, would upload duplicate copies of the re-organized pictures. and then, depending on the rclone options you used, it might leave the original copies in place, which would both waste space and if you ever restored the backup, it would waste the time you spent doing the re-organization.
there's an option in rclone (and similar software like rsync) to delete files on the target (Backblaze) if they're not present on the source (your laptop). that would still upload the duplicate files, but then rclone would delete the copies from their original folder.
however, that "delete files on target if they're not present on the source" option is a Very Bad Idea to enable for backups. because if you accidentally delete a file, you always want to be able to restore it from backup.
another benefit would be in the case of something like ransomware, which overwrites your files with encrypted versions of them, and then charges you a Bitcoin payment to receive the decryption key. as an individual user you're unlikely to have this happen, because ransomware usually targets businesses because they have the ability to pay larger ransoms. but if it did happen, rclone would simply upload the encrypted versions of your files, overwriting the unencrypted versions. restic would notice that the file contents changed, and upload the new copy, but preserve the snapshot of the unencrypted copy. that would allow you to recover the unencrypted files without having to pay the ransom.
Just use the @reboot command in Cron to run when your laptop starts up.
I think you've set it up well and chances are that wouldn't lose anything up to that morning's power on cycle or until the next one. As long as you're not a lid closer rather than system shutdown person, that is.
Else, you could run Restic from Cron (use a script) and run that every 4 hours. However, by doing that there's a chance of causing a lock file during a shutdown and it will fail the backups, so make sure you have a command at the start to clear any locks.