I started self-hosting recently. Getting the hang of it, and have immich and paperless-ngx running. Other stuff too, but those 2 have data i’d like to retain.
I’d like to commit to switching over to these services, and possibly others in the future, however I need to figure out back ups.
Until now, I’ve kept all data on my NAS, and back ups on flash drives. Some i keep here, some i keep off-site (3-2-1 strategy), all encrypted.
I’d like to follow a similar strategy, but going forward i’ll likely have tons of meta data and configs associated with these files and services, which will be just as valuable to backup. Is it simple as copying a folder over, or is there popular back up strategy most people use. Again i’m new, not trying to over complicate things, but don’t want all my eggs in one basket.
Since you’re new to this and therefore probably haven’t set up too much infrastructure yet, let me put in a plug for ZFS for the file system underlying your data. That will unlock for you snapshots and the ability to send very efficient backups off site to another ZFS pool.
There are commercial offerings for all this (I think rsync.net will give you a ZFS target), but I essentially have a second NAS set up at another location for the purpose.
Beyond that, I’m also a big fan of BackBlaze B2, which can give you object-based online storage.
As far as what to back up, that’ll depend on your setup. I usually find it simplest to backup my entire VM and do recovery by restoring the VM.
I’m a dedicated user of
resticand BackBlaze myself. It has worked out really well for me.
btrfs and btrbk are good options for easy snapshots and backups.
