I’m in need of a online backup service, which I can backup my most critical ~1-2 tb of storage to. I used to use SOS online backup, but their prices suddenly became insane.
I googled a bit, and pc-mag praised idrive. But all user reviews says to run away screaming. So I’m not to sure about that one…
It must have at rest encryption, with an encryption key that only I know, so that it aren’t stored on their servers. 2 factor authentication would also be nice.
And the upload/download speeds must be decent. Using several weeks to upload is not acceptable in my world.
So does anyone have a service they can recommend?
Or would I be better off picking up a used laptop, plub in a 2 TB drive, parking it at my parents house and setting up some private backup solution?
I think @Ruffalo has good knowledge and excellent advice on this subject.
Not sure what you want to pay for this online backup. As far as encryption goes, why not encrypt yourself instead of relying on the service?
It would certainly be cheaper this way but doesnt really guarantee your data in the even of an act of god. You’ll have to weigh how mission critical your data is to you. If you did go that route I think a raspberry pi would work wonders for you and not use much in the way of power. You could pair that with an external drive and off you go.
Personally I dont do online backups even at work. At home I just use a synology box for my stuff. At work, 3 disk image rotation that is manually moved each day off site.
I use and recommend Duplicati to an unlimited space GDrive, available for $10/month from Gsuite for Business. And yes, you do get unlimited space even with a single user, yes I know it says you don’t, yes I’m sure.
It is indeed something I don’t want to lose. Alle my files are stored on my 40 tb freenas box running raidz2. I already have my important files backed up to another pc running ubuntu. It runs a rsync command every few days. Only my blu ray collection isn’t backed up. But I have the blu rays, so they are backed up by default.
So it’s “just” the offsite portion of backup I’m missing.
A few gigs won’t cut it. It’s about 1 tb, and it will grow over time.
I’ll look into this. But how is the encryption options? Encryption before uploading? It’s encryption at rest I’m looking for.
I use SpiderOak. They got praised in tinfoil-esque circles for their zero knowledge policy, which among other things, means they don’t store your keys.
I didn’t know, since I never tested it. I mainly use it for backup of documents and such. Just did a test with a large file, several GB. Stopping all other communication from my servers, It reads a consistent 5Mbit/s out on the router. It’s a US based company, and I’m in the heart of Europe, so it’s possible speeds a better there. Your miles may vary.
Worth noting too, is that it needs to build the file first, i.e. encrypting it, which is single threaded, and thus also takes some time before the upload can begin.
On S3 you pay for storage, ingress, and egress. GDrive is $10/month flat for unlimited storage and no transfer fees. And when I say unlimited, I’m not kidding.
Rsync is a poor choice for backups because it doesn’t do versioning. If you really want to use S3, Duplicati supports it as a backup target, and will handle block deduplication, scheduling, versioning, compression, and end-to-end encryption (no peeking!) for you.
1TB on Tarsnap is a whopping $250/month, and they charge extra for transfers too-- the initial upload is another $250. That is ridiculously overpriced. Amazon Drive (their Dropbox/GDrive competitor) will sell you 1TB for $60/year. Paying full price for GDrive, without GSuite for Business, 1TB is $120/year.
If you want to roll your own, it is easier than ever. Get a couple of HDDs (2-3), a low power PC, install (L)Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, set up a ZFS storage pool, install the openssh server and you are more or less done. You can upload/download via SFTP/SCP, and you could probably also get samba or some other protocol working.
The transfer speeds will be of course limited by the internet connection the file server is attached to.
If you want to make this fancier, your best bet would probably be a cheap Ryzen based system with ECC RAM. (something like a Ryzen 3 1200 with 8GB of ECC RAM)
