Hi. I know the best option is my own server (which I have), but I do like having a 3rd party backup option for redundancy. I used to use IDrive, but cancelled it because it frequently would stop backing up without notice. I’m looking to switch to Backspace, CrashPlan or Carbonite. Do you recommend any of them in terms of file security/privacy? Any that is a definite no-no?
Thanks!
Just make sure that whatever solution you choose has client-side encryption. Backblaze is cheap and has encryption built in. I haven’t heard anything bad about them really, but their client isn’t open-source which makes it difficult to verify that the encryption is good. I don’t have any reason to believe it isn’t properly done, but I’ve also never seen an audit of their clients done or anything like that so… make of that what you will.
Alternatively, you can use an open-source client like Duplicati with encryption, and any storage provider. Most storage providers get expensive past 1TB or so though, so if you have a lot of data then a flat-rate plan like Backblaze is more appealing.
CrashPlan.
I have arround 700Gb of personal data and what I do is use Pika Backup (it is a GUI for BorgBackup for linux) to an external HDD every month or so. Also I use a Cloud provider + Cryptomator for stuff within the month period. And on Windows (not that important stuff) I use Duplicati every week. As both softwares only add any changes to the next backup they are quite fast and doesn’t get your HDD full. You can add reminders and how many backups to save. They both are not for full disk back up as in including the OS. If I am not mistaken duplicati works on both windows and linux
I was using BackBlaze previously. Nothing bad to say about them. They are fairly cheap and I use TrueNAS Scale’s built in client side encryption before uploading.
They do say that your files are encrypted on their end and they see nothing meaningful. The beauty of it is that you do not have to trust them if you are doing client side encryption on your end.
For multiTB kind of backup, it might be cheaper to just buy an SBC, put in 2 identical HDDs you can reasonably afford and use a Raid1/mirror setup (because you’d want at least a mirror). Put this setup in a relative’s place and pay for its uptime by subsidizing a small portion of their electric bill and/or internet.
Using Borg Vortra and Borg Backup for my mac and my servers.
But you can only do encryption on your end with their client if you’re using their backup service, so you do have to trust their client is doing the encryption properly, that’s my point.
You were probably using Backblaze B2 which is a different product than Backblaze Backup. I’m sure B2 works well too, but I haven’t used it myself since Wasabi is cheaper for me.
Have been heavily considering my options here, and I’ve landed on using AWS S3 with rclone. If i’m not mistaken rclone can encrypt. It’s by far the cheapest option, unless you are able to use BackBlaze B2 and have more than 7TB of data they would consider legitimate for the unlimited backup.
AWS is only about 1$/TB/month if you are using the deep archive option. Everything else is at least $4-5/TB and only offers 2-3 or maybe 5TB plans. And with AWS you’re only paying for whatever you use.
Might not be good for your use case though, in my case i don’t expect to be retrieving data and will have a local backup on an HDD as well
edited after changing my mind. glacier is too expensive for retrieval to not have another off-site option i think, so glacier will probably be my 2nd off-site backup in a 4-3-2 plan (serving as a last resort)
Glacier charges per file and per GB for uploads and downloads, so rclone alone may not be the best option compared to backup software which bundles your files together. In either case, I would definitely zip/tar/bundle your backups into larger archive files somehow before uploading to Glacier. Otherwise doing a retrieval of many objects at once would be hugely inefficient.
aha. I didn’t know that about the charges (per file). I appreciate the heads up. Probably just Duplicati then?
Thanks. I do have about 2TB right now.
I’ve never really tried to use Glacier. Duplicati likes having read/write access to files to verify them, delete old ones, etc., so it’s not really ideal with anything other than hot storage. With a quick search it doesn’t seem like Glacier works great with it, but then other people report it working.
Off the top of my head I don’t really know the best way to back up to Glacier, short of creating a ZIP/TAR file with all your files bundled together and uploading that.
I also found that Google Cloud’s Archive Storage ($1.20/TB/month) had more reasonable (and easier to understand) operation charges, and used it for a while with no complaints. Having to restore from it—like Glacier—would still probably cost $50-100/TB though, which I eventually decided wasn’t worth potentially dealing with. I’m moving off cloud backups in favor of a few off-site NAS servers now, personally.
yes, i have research to do on how to best proceed practically. interesting you mentioned the NAS thing. i abandoned that idea cause i feel like it’s too much $ and hassle for my tastes. i’m fascinated that you said a few too lol.
Depends on how much data you have. If it’s around $100/year to back up 8TB to the cloud, a NAS would pay for itself in 2-4 years, and I expect them to last at least 6+ years, so it should be cheaper in theory. Then you have the advantages of having 0 data recovery costs, instant access to your data, and full control over it.
I actually have a bit more than 8TB to back up, so it made the most sense in my case.
I actually definitely misunderstood the recovery costs for Glacier earlier. I read some more about it and it seems like it’s basically at least $100/TB…the biggest factor is time frame for retrieval it’s still a lot regardless. and now I think I might be leaning toward off-site NAS…it might be involved but it might be worth it.
I’m now thinking of just using Glacier as a sort of insurance policy that i will hopefully never have to use, but is cheap enough and will just be there if truly needed. That would get me 4-3-2 (What’s the Diff: 3-2-1 vs. 3-2-1-1-0 vs. 4-3-2).
I was, sorry for the confusion.
I’ve been using borgbase.com for my backups. It’s one of the recommended cloud hosting provider for borg backup. So far so good, it provide borg and sftp connector for backups. There is no hidden or complex fees to access files,retrieve files, early deletion or other stuff. Borg encrypt locally before sending the data to the remote website.
I’ve used restic before with a s3/open stack connector, but it was too slow to manage big file like virtual machines. Borg is a little older on term of supported endpoint / destination, requiring ssh access, but it works greak for now.
Wow, borgbase has quite good price. I surely mentioned before on some other topic, but I (still) use Kopia(UI) and make encrypted backups to Nextcloud server. There are no that cheap Nextcloud providers, but I also use it for other stuff, so I will keep it like that in (near) future. But for people who need backup only, this looks like great option
More details on my setup
And I occasionally sync all that data to external HDD (inside veracrypt partition)
Thanks. I had never heard of Borgbase, so I looked it up. Seems promising. Need to try it small scale to see ease of use before fully committing. If you have any tips on how to get it set up, that’d be great.