What actually counts as a copy under the 3-2-1 rule, why a RAID mirror or a snapshot only protects against one kind of failure, and the one-page inventory that exposes the gaps.
Free weekly email with the week’s posts, videos and one tip: https://chartmann1590.github.io/homelab-the-right-way/newsletter/
Disclosure: this is my own article (Charles Hartmann, Homelab the Right Way). Written with AI help and edited by me; the setup described is mine.
I feel like nothing I do is “right”.
Also, I feel like I can’t afford to back things up. Not with the prices of hardware and cloud storage.
Totally get that. You don’t have to back up everything, just the stuff you can’t replace: photos, documents, configs. That set is usually small enough for an old USB drive plus a cheap or free offsite option. Rebuildable stuff (media, ISOs, containers you can redeploy) can skip it. Imperfect backups of the important 5% beat a perfect plan you never get to.
Problem I have is so much of my data is “projects” where like, only god and my client know what random shit they’ll ask for.
Worth checking out borgbase (which supports restic, not only borg) and hetzber backup solutions. There’s also backblaze if your cool with American servers, or easy backup if you want s3 style storage.
Prices are still relatively affordable.
You also don’t have to back up everything. I back up my configuration and documents only.
It’s better to do backups imperfectly than not at all.
You also don’t have to back up everything. I back up my configuration and documents only.
Yeah I mean I have to go this way. My home server is 38 tb and I’m about 60% on that. Alot of it is archival stuff I know better data hoarders than I are keeping on their stacks.
That is a lot of data, I’m jealous. I want that much storage space.
Yeah I guess it can appear that way.
Lets just put it this way though, for one work project, I expect to have to work through ~250 tb of data. We won’t keep it all on disk at once, but over the course of the next year, that was what we spitballed needs to get processed. The system once finished will have to throughput almost a TB a week (which imo, is nothing).
THen in terms of my own storage and what that is. Its some full disk image backups of old machines where I’m lazy and haven’t bothered to clean/ winnow it down to what I really need. Then its two google drive backups of a bout a tb a piece. Then I’ve got a reddit archive of all posts and commens. Thats a couple ter.
Then I have all of the epstien files backed up. The original releases as they came down. Including the redaction mistakes they made. Thats a bunch.
you’re*
In what?
Just use old HDD and thumb drive that are too small, for backup.
Marketplace is your friend. 7th gen intel computers can be found for cheap because Windows doesn’t support them anymore. Wipe the boot disk, install OMV and done. Now the hard part is of course hard disks. Still scour the used market but at least OMV will let you mismatch disk sizes with SnapRAID+MergerFS as long as you aren’t using ZFS and the parity drive is the same or bigger than the largest data drive.
For most people you don’t need to go extremely huge.
Then just set a nightly rsync.
I dont engage with corporate social media.
And craigslist is busted.
You can often find storage in old computers at 2nd hand shops for cheap, and backups don’t usually need to be fast, so performance isn’t super critical.
Kijiji is pretty good too but it might only be in Canada?
But it feeeeels like a backup, and isn’t that what really matters? In my setup I have 3 drives (2x 8Tb, 1x 14 Tb) and I finally have the opportunity to do some consolidation and not just have 3 single drives plugged into a server. Zfs, raid , a dedicated backup drive, but I’m still figuring out what the layout should be.
Ha, it absolutely feels like one, right up until a bad sync or a fat-fingered rm hits every disk at once. With 2x8 TB plus a 14 TB, one layout people often land on is mirroring the two 8s (ZFS mirror) for live data and using the 14 TB as a separate backup target (snapshots replicated to it), plus something offsite for the stuff you can’t lose. That gets you redundancy and an actual backup out of the same three drives.
Put the two 8tb in a mirrored raid so if one fails you keep your data. Use the 14tb as a backup that is left unplugged for longevity.
That would be my recommendation which is similar to what I have (4 x 6 tb for twelve gigs of redundant storage) and a couple of 8tb drives I keep for occasional (monthly or so) archival backup.
I agree. This is also nice because if you need more space in the future you can always add 8TB drives in pairs.
