Your garage is not remote. Remote means somewhere it won’t be affected in case of theft, fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, that sort of thing.

I have Proxmox Backup Server backing up to an external drive nightly, and then about every 2 or 3 weeks also backup to a cold storage which I store offsite. (this is bad practice I know but I have enough redundancies in place of personal data that I’m ok with it).

For critical info like my personal data I have a sync-thing that is syncing to 3 devices, so for personal info I have roughly 4 copies(across different devices) + the PBS + potentially dated offsite.

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I mailed my buddy a Raspberry pi with a large hard drive attached and rsyc to it.

Once had problems with an internal drive so each device I run uses an external SSD/HDD. Anything important that has an “export data” or backup option such as Paperless I’ll export/backup & put that into Nextcloud. Nextcloud files are synced between multiple desktops, one of which then gets automatically backed up to a separate drive each week.

For all my other self host stuff I since deployed Kopia to perform nightly local backups of each thing I self host. Once per month a Kopia backup for each software gets moved to a separate drive.

On top of that, things I deem as particularly important get encrypted in Cryptomator & uploaded off site.

No doubt there’s probably better/easier ways but thats my current workflow.

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I do local backups to another drive, and online encrypted backups to cloud storage (I use backblaze B2)

I have a file server for copy 1, an external drive with incremental backups for copy 2, and copy 3 is a physically unplugged copy in a firesafe lockbox that I update manually. I don’t use any cloud providers to back up anything.

I see lots of solutions here, but some explanation of the basics are missing for someone starting out… this is not meant to sound preachy…

RAID is not a backup. It’s just better hardware fault tolerance. Delete does the same thing on RAID as it does one 1 drive.

Everyone syncs / copies / duplicates files somewhere, but you need a way of finding the previous backup in case something was deleted. This can be done with various ways / tech, but the point is - have some history not just 1 copy. Many pointers to 3-2-1 in here, but that also doesn’t mean 3 copies of just today’s data…

Backups are nothing without Restores. Test the backups. Various ways, but do it. Often.

And consider what you’re backing up and why… ie just your data? (Ie photos), or all the config files, databases, operating systems, etc to do a full restore on new metal. If the latter, I recommend keeping your data separate from the OS / config files, etc.

Source: decades of tech disasters 😁

I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t have my data backed up in 6 different places. I spent way too many years as a sysadmin to deal with 2 backups.

ZFS mirrors on my Proxmox server with multiple nodes replicating to each other. Replications of those datasets to zfs.rent. Proxmox backup server taking hourly snapshots and doing it to multiple drives. Rotating USB drives on that PBS server. Backups of the data for each VM and each docker container stack via rsync. Borg backup. Multiple Nextcloud clients with each having their file syncs held locally, then rsynced to a secondary drive.

I could probably come up with a couple more that I’ve forgotten I have running. I got burned once and it made me mad.

I use remote encrypted backup and it’s been good so far. Hetzner Storage box, around $11/month for 5TB, pretty reasonable. If you want a lot more storage you can pay somewhat less per TB.

Basically:

• Small proxmox node (Zimablade) that basically does only operate a Proxmox Backup Server for local clients and fast backup.

• Offsite ZFS send to a VPS I operate for that purpose. As well as Proxmox Backup Server for VMs,etc. Basically meant as a fast recovery option. (Layer7)

• Offsite S3 storage backup to a different provider from above. Meant for a medium term backup. (Hetzner and IONOS)

• Portable HD: I have two different portable HDs. One is hooked up to the Backup server, the other one is in a lock box in my banks safe. The “connected one” does a weekly backup (and is switched off in between). Once in a while (around 6 to 12 weeks, with 12 weeks being the hard maximum) I take the active one to the bank and both drives switch places. That provides a full backup. (WD My Book and Seagate Expansion - the differrnt manufacturers are intentional)

• Last line of defence: The real real important things (photos of life events-weddings,etc.- important documents,Password DBs) etc.) get burned on a M-disc Archive blue ray. They are also in the bank safe and at a secure third location. They are more meant for “shit hit the fan and I might not be there anymore,but maybe the kids want these”. Additionally they provide a defence against encryption viruses - write once reas many (WORM) has it’s advantages here.

This is another thing to consider: Have detailed descriptions for others how to retrieve your data in case something happens. I operate a private wiki (on an external server) that also gets saved into the M-Discs that has step by step instructions, as they might need to be followed by someone not that tech adept. (Like my In-Laws in case both my wife and I perish.), have notes in my password DB (Vaultwarden, which has a digital heritage/emergency access function and is also exported), in the vault, and a note in my will notifying people about this.

Edit: And: Test your recovery. Almost every data loss I have witnessed in the last years was a recovery problem. Missing encryption keys, data structure issues, etc. I have seen them all. Personally I try to recover a random file (as in: A script tells me which one) twice a year from every method and try a full recovery of each method at least once six month after introduction. Thst being said: It’s nice to have encrypted backups,but that doesn’t help if you can’t find the keys/the software does no longer exist,etc. Currently a LOT of my clients have the same problem: They use Tandberg RDX for backup, including WORM. Now, Tandberg has gone bust and it’s not that unlikely that yhey won’t be able get another RDX drive in 5 or 10 years. Or 20. Which is the legal requirement for some official files here. Well,fuck. They needed to get additional drives asap when the bankruptcy became official.

Friends have used ancient LTOs and now face the same issues - LTOs are not downwards compatible. (That’s why I use “common” technology. It’s extremely likely that I will be able to find a spare BD drive in 20 years,etc.)

I’d recommend using a job monitoring service that will alerts you if it doesn’t get a check in. It’s very useful if your backups fail silently or hang mid-job for some reason.

I use https://healthchecks.io/ since it has a free tier and it works well.

I’m a bit lazy so it’s simple but it works: for the important stuff i have a borg endpoint on onedrive.

I put encrypted backups (borg or restic) on a storage box from Hetzner. One local copy on a different drive and one remote. Keep your encryption passwords safe though, otherwise they aren’t worth much.

Oh, and I plan to report status of the cron jobs that run these backup scripts via MQTT and display backup status in Home Assistant. But haven’t started that yet. So far I dump the logs and view them occasionally.