3 methods for me...
- (daily) live nas backup (I have 2 of these mirrored for giggles)
- (90 days) cold, manual copy of nas data to drive stored in pelican case
- (live) cheap cloud storage of essential data in backblaze encrypted vault (duplicati)
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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I wouldn't trust the disconnected drives. They fail more often when offline than on, in my experience.
Granted it's your 3rd backup, so it's a smaller risk.
i spose...
my anecdote;
ive been runnin drives like this for 30 years. ive literally never had a cold storage drive go bad out of the case.. mostly because their hourly use rate is kept so incredibly low. even back in the day of very unreliable drives..
they even retain their data better than modern ssds
Depends on your paranoia/fault tolerance level. In general some form of the 3-2-1 backup rule. Personally I use arqbackup:
- Local live copy
- Hourly differential backups to another network share
- Hourly differential backups to an s3 compatible bucket with with object lock and versioning so malware can’t wipe the latest 3 months or so.
Depends on what you're using as a platform. You should use something that integrates with it, like proxmox PVE and PBS
I have 2 powered RAID enclosures from icybox with 2 multi TB HDD in each one. The RAID is set to mirror the drives.
They are connected via usb 3 to a raspberry pi which runs borgbackup.
One is in my own place, just next to the main server.
The other is at my parents place in another city.
All my desktops, laptops and servers have borgmatic installed with the two pi's as two targets. So when I create a backup it gets send to both locations. On my PCs I manually do a borg backup like once a month when I feel like it. The server computers are all on a daily schedule.
Borg has extremely efficient compression and defuplication. So having 20 historical snapshots of the whole file storage of each device takes about 30% less space than the original size on disk.
For example my desktop currently uses ~800GB but the borgbackup of said desktop takes only ~500GB.
The only disadvantage I find is that there is no cross system deduplication.
The super useful advantage is that I was able to just take the HDD enclosure, plug it into my Desktop and restore whatever files I want. I did an rsync to a blank fs once and it restored everything properly. And it's pretty cheap. like 150$ total per backup location without any significant monthly costs.
I used hetzners storagebox for a while for borgbackups but restoring from it was SO SLOW. And my internet connection is not stable enough to do that without interruptions for multiple days. Never again, except for using it as an extra last resort "cloud" backup.
My server takes weekly backups via proxmox that are pushed to an NAS. The NAS backups and some additional files are copied up to filen.io for cloud storage. Probably not as professional as many of the setups you will see but it works for me.