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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.
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.