Always used Seafile to backup all of my electronics. Then borgmatic and borgbase as my only remote backup for my entire server. Local backup on another drive every now and then.

Have been having trouble fixing up the latest version of Seafile in docker and I've gotten too busy to deal with it over and over.

And now I only have to deal with my own backup data. So Seafile isn't so useful anymore.

Looking for information on other home server data backup flows.

At most 500Gb of usage is what I expect to idle around. Need integrity checks, best speeds and reputable service. The works, I know.

Looking for same annual pricing as borgbase (~80USD) or better of course.

Here are a couple I found:

  • Filen
  • Jottacloud
  • some Hetzner storage or something

Definetly need a CLI tool with syncing. Or some method for client side encryption backups.

Thoughts? Thanks in advance.

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[–] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm not sure I fully grasp what you want, but Restic is excellent. I use a cronjob to back up on a schedule. It's command line only. I think there's a tool to make it a GUI but I haven't tried it. They have a Docker image available but it's weird, you have to pass commands to it, it runs, then shuts down when it's done. I love Docker but that didn't quite work for me.

I use Backblaze B2 for storage, but any S3 will do. Restic supports all sorts of storage targets.

Credentials and things go in an .env file, or you can put everything into the command line every time.

When it's time to restore things, you can fricken mount the whole backup you want and browse the files, copy and paste what you need, etc. That part is really cool to me.

Backblaze is $5 or $6 USD per TB per month, so 500GB will be about $36USD a year.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Fun tip on restic for restoring or browsing snapshots. The restic mount command lets you mount your backups to your filesystem and that enables you to browse all your snapshots and all the files at different points in time all from your file manager. Then you can just drag and drop to restore files as needed.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I've never had to restore a backup (yet), but to me this is the best feature of Restic.

    I used Duplicati for a while (I think it was Duplicati, not Duplicacy) and although the backups seemed to work, I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

    Restic is a slight chore to get set up with the environmental variables, figuring out which directories to "--ignore", etc... but man once it's set up it's just great.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

    It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

    Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

    The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I also wholeheartedly recommend Restic. Hetzner Storage Box or Backblaze B2 are great storage backends and directly supported by Restic.

    Borg is great too, though I've never used it because I've discovered Restic first.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    I really like duplicacy. It's just a single executable you add to your path, then configure it to back up to basically any remote you want. I don't even bother to run it in a container since it doesn't have dependencies. Encrypted, compressed, deduplicated, incremental backups. The algorithm is pretty slick too. It can back up multiple machines to the same repository, and it'll dedupe across them without any locks required.

    Duplicacy CLI is free, and there's a front-end for a reasonable fee. I think $50 for the first year, then $10 for every subsequent year.

    For storage, you can just go with whatever is cheapest/easiest. I use a gdrive I'm paying for regardless for effectively free storage. But if I didn't have that, Hetzner seems very appealing. I think it's $4/mo for 1TB? Very reasonable, and you wouldn't need to worry about api calls or chunk size / file count like you would with S3/B2/StorJ.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    +1 for Duplicacy (the GUI, as a container). Very worth it, IMO. Not only do I use it for my PC, I back up my server to my other server in another state with it. I also use it with Backblaze B2 (for very important files) which is slightly more than Hetzner ($6/TB). I haven't run into any chunking issues and they don't charge for API calls. Highly recommendated.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    +1 on duplicity. I run it directly on the host, outside of my docker containers. Grabs the data from the different volumes for my Nextcloud etc, puts it all into an AWS infrequent access bucket. Costs me ~3$USD/month. Pretty simple. Runs on cron

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If you have already borg, why don't use it?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Checking out alternatives to see if there might be a better solution compared to when I set up my server initially last year.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I use Veeam.
    The Agent is free amd can do integrity checks
    The B&R server can manage multiple systems has a steeper learning curve can be free (with a reduced featureset) or operated with a license.

    I use Veeam at home and at work and I quite love it.
    (And they recently started supporting Proxmox)

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    For me borg is ideal. Once a month I run a backup.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    I use Hetzner Storage Box for my backup needs - TrueNAS handles this for me on a regular interval and encrypts them before upload (yay rclone!). I needed a bit more storage than you, to the tune of 5TB, and for this much data they were the cheapest (12eur / 15usd per month iirc).

    Consider slightly more storage if you need snapshots. For my storage box i enabled them, and now have a history of last 4 monthly backups.

    If you use rclone, you can mount the remote backup as a fuse filesystem and browse your backup like it would be a local file - extract what you need only. Any livecd / USB with rclone can help you rescue your data in case of disaster.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I use Kopia to perform incremental encrypted backups (with some retention policy of up to two years) and store them on Backblaze B2, which is reasonably cheap.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I haven't changed much in years, still run a truenas box (was freenas before) with 5 spinning rust drives and never lost any data yet (bang goes something now I've said it). Currently duplicati but some stuff is just backed up manually still. Each to their own like, and immich on truenas for backing up photos and videos

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Perhaps urbackup? She might not be the most pretty girl but works like s charm. It works on window, Linux and I do believe Mac as well.

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