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What is your cloud backup service of choice?
I have been going over services for which I pay monthly in my business. I have 17 clients where I do unattended cloud backups as well as doing a backup that I hold onto myself. Overall I backup around 4TB of data. I'm looking at possibly changing cloud services as the one I currently use has progressively increased their fees. I understand the need to pay for a good, reliable service as it reflects upon myself , my business and the service I provide but feel there are more competitive companies out there.
None of this is for personal use and many cloud services are just that, personal use. These are all server (Windows and Linux) use cases.
My desktop backs up to Backblaze because I like the "just backup everything, no questions asked" -approach and just for synergy's sake I use Backblaze B2 for my NAS (Synology) and as a Restic target.
I've been backblaze subscriber since 2017. I think it was $60/yr back then. I treat it like an off site insurance policy. The two price hikes in the past 2 years have me fussed tho. Are you (or anyone) aware of an alternative?
According to Backblaze's report, my current backup is a hair under 3TB at the moment. It's not the cheapest option, but I don't need to care how much data I'm storing.
Basically I'm exchanging a bit of money for the fact that I can just back up EVERYTHING and not worry about costs.
Likely one of the many options from iDrive.
I'll second iDrive. While I'm a techie, I'm not keen on setting up homebrew solutions at the non-profit where I work.
I set up iDrive after the previous back up company nearly tripled their price in a few years. iDrive just works. It's pretty straight forward and simple, has tons of space (for our needs) and is relatively cheap to boot.
I use b2 from Backblaze using Arq as the client. I have not had any issues and everything has been quite reliable. I believe that Arq encrypts things locally before transmitting.
I just switched from Backblaze to Kopia + Backblaze B2. Honestly, it was a bit of a pain to set up. I had to figure out which files/directories to exclude and, before I did figure it out, I had a particular app that was breaking the backup and forcing my initial snapshot to run forever. Now that I have all that figured out though, it's running smoothly.
Before settling on Kopia, I explored Arc, which is nicer to use than Kopia, but the cost of renewing the license plus the storage was going to be nearly the cost of Backblaze. I decided it wasn't worth the extra trouble to save $10-20 a year. With Kopia, it was a lot more trouble to set up, but I'm saving a lot more money since the software is free and open source. Backblaze estimates my storage costs at about $3.75/month, and my backup is more comprehensive than it was before on Backblaze because of their forced ignore list. I'm backing up over 900GB.
rsync.net, with borg as a client. I find the "we do one thing, targeted at people who already know they need that one thing, and do it very well for very cheap" genre of companies very appealing.
Anyone here use Tarsnap?
I’m curious how efficient their de-duplication is because you’re paying for de-duped + compressed data but it’s hard to know what the monthly sticker price is because their prices are somewhat high by today’s standards.
You'll get nearly the same functionality at about a tenth of the cost if you use rsync.net and pipe your data through tar and openssl yourself.
There's nothing wrong with Tarsnap, especially if you have bandwidth concerns or a small volume of data to back up. It's a solid OOTB solution, but you're right that it's pretty overpriced for what it is.
Yea, someone else in the thread mentioned Restic and glancing at the docs I think it's allowing you to do the same thing with server-side de-duplication of arbitrary data with a cloud provider of your choice (for a fraction of the price).
For anyone else curious, I found someone comparing this scenario:
https://www.ericroberts.dev/posts/2023/tarsnap-restic-backblaze/
tl;dr: Restic is not only much cheaper, it's much faster at restoring your data by around a factor of ~50x.
To be clear, Restic does do de-duping by default without any special setup needed. That link is specifically about the edge case where you're moving a backup to a different pre-existing Restic repository that has been configured differently and already contains data, in which case deduping between the transferred backup and the other existing backups may fail to happen if extra action isn't taken.
Ah, understood, thanks. I was thinking there was a local repository and a server side one but I see now it's just a single remote repository for most users.
I host a nextcloud instance on a cheap server with server side encryption enabled ($6/mo), and mount an S3-compat bucket from iDrive ($40 for 2tb a year) on it (through nextcloud, not mounted directly on device). Nextcloud has decent support, great server side encrypt, and their webdav implementation is freakishly good. I also use a few other docker containers on the server.
Previously I was running Rclone + Rclone crypt for E2E upload to the bucket, and that was hit or miss (and don't get me started on my weird termux setup with automation for backing up my phone to it).
Edit: you were asking for providers, can't really help there but I would suggest anything with a S3 or B2 storage backend. Backblaze has some interesting backup options, as does iDrive iirc.
I run a Nextcloud instance with local storage for lightweight data. How difficult is it to mount the S-3 bucket? Sounds interesting
Not hard at all. I found this after the fact, but here is their official instructions. If you enable server-side encryption, it'll encrypt the contents of the files on your bucket as well.
Thanks for the info, I'm going to give it a whirl this weekend!
Anyone knows a credible backup service based on Free Software? Using Nextcloud or sth.
rsync.net runs on FreeBSD and ZFS.
you can use any client-side backup program you wish that supports SSH/SFTP as a remote endpoint (which is very nearly all of them). restic (one such tool) maintains a list of other options, and one of their criteria for inclusion on the list is "Free Software (not just Open Source)".
I use owncloud (the free gpl version, but you can probably do the same thing in nextcloud) hosted on an ubuntu machine.
I have a small python script that I run nightly that uploads incremental encrypted backups to s3 glacial with duplicity.
It just takes the whole data folder and everything in it.
I do the same thing with my git repos (hosted using gitolite)
I also have a small service I did that I only use myself, in that case I dump and upload the whole database, not incrementally since it's small enough that it doesn't make any difference, and it's easier to work with non-incremental things.
Check the comment from 0x29a. They echo what I would have written, only downside is that their managed NC installs have some limits (unable to activate server encryption, but that was mainly developed for external storage use anyway)
Restic is an open source backup tool which does incremental encrypted backups and can store backups in many different storages and services, including a local drive, SSH/SFTP servers, or S3-compatible services including Backblaze B2 (which I recommend because it's very cheap; I think it's the cheapest pay-as-you-go service for storage mentioned in this thread).
Just to be sure - e.g. I buy a Backblaze B2 subscription, set backup using Restic and it will be encrypted just for me, so that only I can access data?
In that case it would be stored in a Backblaze B2 bucket, which you need to authenticate to access. Additionally, Restic encrypts snapshots using AES-256 so neither Backblaze nor anyone else can access your data.
I use a scheduled script with restic backing up to rsync.net. I use their cheaper tier without snapshots and it fits my needs perfectly. I haven't done a full recovery in the 3 years I've been using this setup, but partial recoveries have worked very smoothly. I only backup about 200GBs.
I'm using Spideroak (One Backup).
Started using it when it was their main product and consumers were a bit part of their revenue. Since then they have branched out, mainly towards cybersecurity services for government and military. It is a little harder to find the service, but it is still there (and for some weird reason, on the crossclave domain).
What I liked about Spideroak was that it is a full backup solution. It makes incremented backups of your files, encrypt them locally and then send it into the cloud. Without password, no decryption.
Had to put a backup back once in the roughly 8 years that I'm a customer. Worked like a charm.
The desktop application is light, runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, has both a UI, but also powerful
command line options.
I believe I pay around $60 per year for 150 GB of storage.
It uses a desktop tool that works
I pay like 70 bucks/year
Doesn't SpiderOak technically use Convergent Encryption rather than like zero-knowledge fully e2ee? Pleasecorrect me if I'm wrong and I suppose it probably wouldn't be an issue in the context of individual backups but I've heard conflicting statements on its implementation of encryption 🤔
I believe 'zero-knowledge' in cryptography has a different meaning and that's were the discussion was coming from. Spideroak since then calls it 'No-knowledge'.
But it is end-to-end encryption based on 2048 bit RSA and 256 bit AES encryption, both data and folder/file names
At the time I became a customer, they were the only one offering secure backups.
Ah k. I've definitely heard them often characterized as a pioneer in that respect but there's always a healthy/unhealthy amount of innuendo in the particular communities interested in these topics and platforms
Hetzner Storage Share (hosted Nextcloud) is what I use. That said it's for a personal use case and may not necessarily match your needs. Roughly $5 USD a month. 1TB.
They also have a similar service (Storage Box) without Nextcloud that can be used with other sync tools that is self-managed and even cheaper.
I retain a Backblaze B2 account and similar Scaleway account for super low cost bucket storage (I plan to use it as cheap long term, rarely accessed storage)
I use the idrive frontend on my mac. It's not aesthetically pleasing, but it seems to work very well and their support is accessible and helpful, and it's quite economical. I assume any minute it will completely enshittify.
I use OneDrive because Microsoft offers 1TB for $80/year (Canada) with Microsoft 365 personal.
I use
rcloneweekly with the encryption option to backup my entire local ZFS NAS for disaster recovery. This is all done through Proxmox on a homelab rack.Works very well, no complaints. Only thing is I have to manually copy the photos over from the phones once in awhile.
In the interim between device backups, the phones backup to various Google Photos accounts (free), and OneDrive photos (part of the 1TB).
I'm so impressed by this. It's the hardest part of any backup solution.
I pay Google for 100GB but I use it only as backup for family's phones.
For my own backup:
Going to be the outlier in the comments so far, both in terms of vendor and device discussed: iCloud can have its use cases (only for iOS/iPadOS devices, obviously. I don't think they even offer full cloud backups for desktop/Mac (yet?))
The ease of use is unbeatable, and if you don't use Apple's Photos built-in app/cloud sync, the backups will stay at a reasonable size.
I'm above it because of iCloud Drive, but you could feasibly get away with using the $1 plan (50 GB) for backing up an iPhone and an iPad without too many photos on them. $12 a year for literally never having to think about it and immensely easy recovery/re-install from backup is pretty unbeatable for more normie users* in my opinion, at least for these mobile devices.
*Those are more likely going to use the default Apple Photos feature, though, which'll probably push it up to the $3 per month tier.
I use duplicacy with Wasabi for the backend. I also use rclone to create a local backup to my NAS. It was far more fiddly than something like BackBlaze, but now that I've gotten all of the filters in place it's been working great for a few years now. I use the CLI so restoring isn't nearly as nice, but it works. The developer built a GUI after I started using the CLI, so that would probably be a more user-friendly experience.
I used to use CrashPlan until the app started having issues running out of memory, and then the company decided they didn't want to offer the service for individuals. Part of my search was to find something that didn't rely on a service that could be shut down. If Wasabi closed up shop, I could easily point duplicacy to another backend like BackBlaze B2, S3, etc.
Business backup here.
Windows = Altaro (Hornet Security) to NAS, NAS to B2.
Linux = Restic to B2, Borg to NAS
NAS is a Synology and it has clean replication to B2 so the data is encrypted by the software backing it up. I can restore easily and quickly.
I also use the NAS to pull the M365 estate in continuous backup and that has been awesome, although I run that in tandem with DropSuite.