I don't. Of my 120tb, I only care about the 4tb of personal data and I push that to a cloud backup. The rest can just be downloaded again.

Personally I deal with it by prioritizing the data.

I have about the same total size Unraid NAS as you, but the vast majority is downloaded or ripped media that would be annoying to replace, but not disastrous.

My personal photos, videos and other documents which are irreplaceable only make up a few TB, which is pretty managable to maintain true local and cloud backups of.

Not sure if that helps at all in your situation.

Not all data is equal. I backup things i absolutely can not lose and yolo everything else. My love for this hobby does not extend to buying racks of hard drives.

You'll think I'm crazy, and you're not wrong, but: sneakernet.

Every time I run the numbers on cloud providers, I'm stuck with one conclusion: shit's expensive. Way more expensive than the cost of a few hard drives when calculated over the life expectancy of those drives.

So I use hard drives. I periodically copy everything to external, encrypted drives. Then I put those drives in a safe place off-site.

On top of that, I run much leaner and more frequent backups of more dynamic and important data. I offload those smaller backups to cloud services. Over the years I've picked up a number of lifetime cloud storage subscriptions from not-too-shady companies, mostly from Black Friday sales. I've already gotten my money's worth out of most of them and it doesn't look like they're going to fold anytime soon. There are a lot of shady companies out there so you should be skeptical when you see "lifetime" sales, but every now and then a legit deal pops up.

I will also confess that a lot of my data is not truly backed up at all. If it's something I could realistically recreate or redownload, I don't bother spending much of my own time and money backing it up unless it's, like, really really important to me. Yes, it will be a pain in the ass when shit eventually hits the fan. It's a calculated risk.

I am watching this thread with great interest, hoping to be swayed into something more modern and robust.

Backup to 2nd nas.

Important stuff gets backed up to cloud storage. Whatever is cheapest.

In my case Synology c2 cloud was cheapest.

I've been following this post since the first comment.

And I have just put together my own RAID1 1TB NAS. And I did not think that 1TB will serve me forever, more like "a good start".

But the numbers I've been seeing in here... you guys are nuts 😆

I'm not sure if I qualify as a 'larger local hoster' but I would go through your 20 TB and decide what really is important enough to backup in case the wheels fall off. Linux ISOs, those can be re-downloaded, although it would take a bit of time. The things that can't be readily downloaded such as my music collection that I have been accumulating for decades, converted to flac, and meticulously tagged, can't be re-downloaded. So that is one of my priorities to back up. Pictures, business documents, personal documents, can't be re-downloaded, so that goes on the 'must back up' list....and so on. Just cull out what is and isn't replaceable. I would bet that once you do that, your 20 TB will be a bit more slim, and you're not trying to push 20TB up the pipe to a cloud backup.

I use BackBlaze's Personal, unlimited tier for $99 USD per year, which is a pretty sweet deal. One thing about Backblaze to remember is that the drives being backed up must be physically connected to the PC doing the backup/uploading. I get around that because I have a hot swap bay on my main PC, but there are other methods and software that will masquerade your NAS or other as a physically connected drive.

Lto tape. But I only have 15tb

It quickly becomes cost effective when you actually need the data to be safe. Far easier to have off site backups. I have never had a problem , but I like to have offline backup. Most of the time my data is static. So I am only backing up projects files ans changes for the most part.

If you have 40+ tb of dynamic data I can’t help there.

Edit: I buy used drives that are usually 2 generations old, so I got lto-5 drives when lto 7 was new. The used drives may be less reliable but used drives can be 1/10th the price of the newest ones.

Recently helped someone get set up with backblaze B2 using Kopia, which turned out fairly affordable. It compresses and de-duplicates leading to very little storage use, and it encrypts so that Backblaze can't read the data.

Kopia connects to it directly. To restore, you just install Kopia again and enter the same connection credentials to access the backup repository.

My personal solution is a second NAS off-site, which periodically wakes up and connects to mine via VPN, during that window Kopia is set to update my backups.

Kopia figures out what parts of the filesystem has changed very quickly, and only those changes are transferred over during each update.

For me, I only back up data I can't replace, which is a small subset of the capacity of my NAS. Personal data like photos, password manager databases, personal documents, etc. get locally encrypted, then synced to a cloud storage provider. I have my encryption keys stored in a location that's automatically synced to various personal devices and one off-site location maintained by a trusted party. I have the backups and encryption key sync configured to keep n old versions of the files (where the value of n depends on how critical the file is).

Incremental synchronization really keeps the bandwidth and storage costs down and the amount of data I am backing up makes file level backup a very reasonable option.

If I wanted to back up everything, I would set up a second system off-site and run backups over a secure tunnel.

entire nas (~24TB used) is replicated to another nas in another building (2 actually). i like having 3 copies.

Well, first while raid is great, it's not a replacement for backups. Raid is mostly useful if uptime is imperative, but does not protect against user errors, software errors, fs corruption, ransomware or a power surge killing the entire array.

Since uptime isn't an issue on my home nas, instead of parity I simply have cold backups which (supposedly) I plug in from time to time to scrub the filesystems.

If a online drive dies I can simply restore it from backup and accept the downtime. For my anime I have simply one single backup, but or my most important files I have 2 backups just in case one fails. (Unfornately both onsite)

On the other hand, for a client of mine's server where uptime is imperative, in addiction to raid I have 2 automatic daily backups (which ideally one should be offsite but isn't, at least they are in different floors of the same building).

With another large NAS.

What's your recovery needs?

It's ok to take 6 months to backup to a cloud provider, but do you need all your data to be recovered in a short period of time? If so, cloud isn't the solution, you'd need a duplicate set of drives nearby (but not close enough for the same flood, fire, etc.

But, if you're ok waiting for the data to download again (and check the storage provider costs for that specific scenario), then your main factor is how much data changes after that initial 1st upload.

As someone who has experienced double failure twice in my lifetime, I seriously recommend doing backups.

The problem is that the only serious backup solution is another HDD for this size. A robot array for tapes or worm drives is probably out of budget.

Like others, I have a 2 tier system.

About 2TB of my (Synology) NAS is critical files. Those get sent via Hyperbackup to cloud storage on at least a weekly basis, some daily. I have them broken up into multiple tasks with staggered schedules so it never has much to do on any given day.

The other 16TB I have get sync'd (again with hyperbackup, but not a scheduled backup task) to a 20TB external drive roughly once per quarter. Then that drive lives on the closet of a family member.

Backblaze offers unlimited data on a single computer, $99/year.

There might be some fine print that excludes your setup but might be worth investigating.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/pricing

Honestly, I'd buy 6 external 20tb drives and make 2 copies of your data on it (3 drives each) and then leave them somewhere-safe-but-not-at-home. If you have friends or family able to store them, that'd do, but also a safety deposit box is good.

If you want to make frequent updates to your backups, you could patch them into a Raspberry Pi and put it on Tailscale, then just rsync changes every regularly. Of course means that wherever youre storing the backup needs room for such a setup.

I often wonder why there isn't a sort of collective backup sharing thing going on amongst self hosters. A sort of "I'll host your backups if you host mine" sort of thing. Better than paying a cloud provider at any rate.

I have 3 main NASes

78TB (52TB usable) hot storage. ZFS1

160TB (120TB) warm storage ZFS2

48TB (24TB) off site. ZFS mirror

I rsync every day from hot to off site.

And once a month I turn on my warm storage and sync it.

Warm and hot storage is at the same location.

Off site storage is with a family friend who I trust. Data isn't encrypted aside from in transit. That's something else I'd like to mess with later.

Core vital data is sprinkled around different continents with about 10TB. I have 2 nodes in 2 countries for vital data. These are with family.

I think I have 5 total servers.

Cost is a lot obviously, but pieced together over several years.

The world will end before my data gets destroyed.

I use aws s3 deep archive storage class, $0.001 per GB per month. But your upload bandwidth really matters in this case, I only have a subset of the most important things backed up this way otherwise it would take months just to upload a single backup. Using rclone sync instead of just uploading the whole thing each time helps but you still have to get that first upload done somehow...

I have complicated system where:

• borgmatic backups happen daily, locally
• those backups are stored on a btrfs subvolume
• a python script will make a read-only snapshot of that volume once a week
• the snapshot is synced to s3 using rclone with --checksum --no-update-modtime
• once the upload is complete the btrfs snapshot is deleted

I've also set up encryption in rclone so that all the data is encrypted an unreadable by aws.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #119 for this comm, first seen 26th Feb 2026, 15:51] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I have 2 500GB SSDs in RAID1 for important data, truenas apps etc..., then 32TB total in RAIDZ1 for large Dataset that won't need speed (movies, TV show, music, pictures, archives,...)

If I have a complete NAS failure, a remote backup (via rsync to a friend's NAS Weekly) of the SSD and bootable drive can be used in a new system, and my torrent app has the list and magnet of all torrents stored on the SSD so it can re-download them.