My Backup Strategy

Hey All!

Wanted to talk about my backup strategy for my digital life & family network. We all have those important files we want to keep safe & secure, whether they are Family Photos, Taxes, Hobby Projects that you eventually get back too ;) but never have time for, etc.

In my home, my family uses a wide range of devices, PCs, Macs, Tablets, and everything in between but how do we keep it all backed up. Most services do offer cloud backups but in today's changing world where data is king and privacy is all the rage, I wanted to know I had complete ownership over my data. If you want to see a list of great privacy tools, visit Privacytools.io or StandardNotes.org.

Let's start off with the Desktops & Laptops, I use https://backblaze.com, with this, I pay a flat rate of $6.99/month per machine for unlimited backup storage. For part of the family that is not too technical, this is perfect, you just install their agent, and its backups up continuously fully encrypted with Zero-Knowledge enabled.

The downside is Backblaze doesn't really let you choose what to backup but its AI does a great job knowing what to backup such as your HOME directory like C:\Users\<username> or /Users on Mac and leaves out all the system-level files. I set it and forget it and it's been my go-to for the past few years.

Let's talk about devices, tablets, iPhones, Android phones like the Pixel 5. I rely on services like iCloud, Google Drive, Google Photos to handle my automatic backup on those devices, but I add one extra step here in which I own a Synology DS220+ NAS storage array on my home network.

I have set up my Synology to use what is called "Cloud Sync" to back up my Google, Apple data & photos to my local NAS, Backblaze Cloud (Similar to AWS S3) & AWS S3 Glacier (Cold Storage) at the same time. So now my Cloud data that is in Apple iCloud & Google are now safely backed up daily to both Backblaze & AWS Glacier at VERY cheap rates as there meant for long-term storage and hopefully, retrieval is very minimal in the case of a disaster.

Lastly, let's discuss cloud servers & IoT devices. I use my Raspberry Pi & VPS's in AWS Lightsail, Digitial Ocean, or GCP for various OSS Projects and Hobbies of mine in Web Development. I use a tool called "restic", over at https://restic.net. There is a great write-up about restic at https://frontpagelinux.com/tutorials/restic-backups-flexible-powerful-backup-solution/ if you wish to learn more.

On these types of servers, I have restic set up as a cronjob which creates snapshots of my Linux directories and stores a deduped copy of my files encrypted by default in AWS S3 Glacier & Backblaze on a daily basis.

By having my long-term encrypted backups stored in both Backblaze & AWS Glacier, I have ensured full dual redundancy of my family's files and my cloud data is safely in two locations at a very low cost that is affordable. If you wish to learn more or want more details, feel free to reach out to me!