Problem

For a while now, I haven’t had a great backup solution and over the last couple of years, I’ve endeavored to solve that problem. As part of this journey, I set up a little LXC on my home server along with the avahi daemon over samba to get a networked time machine drive on my network (this solution might make for a good blog post one day!)

This works relatively well for onsite backups but this blog post is about the next problem I faced, off site backups. I knew that I was taking a huge risk by not having any offsite backups and was really risking a lot of data that I value dearly if anything were to physically damage my home server. And as the old saying goes “one is none, and two is one” as far as backups go, so this was really something I needed to persue to at least get one full backup in place.

Requirements and Decisions

Storage Provider

Like most folks out there, I am very very tired of all of my subscriptions, and so a huge requirement for me with setting this up was to not add on another costly subscription. Of course, I do understand the realities that storage does cost money, and any provider that I would use would charge me something. Therefore, my requirements for a provider were to find one that:

Was Cheap
Would not charge me if I did not actively use it

The search with these goals in mind led me to the excellent cloud services provider Hetzner. I went with their BX11 offering, which gives you 1 TB of storage for a maximum charge of €3.81. They also have a ton of other features included within this offering such as automated snapshots that you can restore this service box from, and support just about every protocol imaginable (Samba, FTP, Rsync, RClone, Restic, etc.).

Backup Mechanism

Since I hadn’t gone with a slick all-in-one backup provider like Crashplan or BackBlaze, I was now tasked with bringing my own backup mechanism to back my data up to my Hetzner box. For a backup mechanism, I wanted something that would:

Be able to detect changes between files since the last sync and only sync up the deltas
Not require a lot of tinkering after set up. I really need this to be a reliable set it and forget it solution, and not require a lot of maintenance to keep running.
Some sort of built in encryption capabilities would be a huge bonus

These requirements led me to Restic. Restic works amazingly well for my usecase because it allows you to create a repository, add files to that repository, and also push those backups remotely via one of the many protocols that Hetzner’s storage boxes support. As a bonus, the repostories that are created are also encrypted by default when created.

Final Solution

With both those decisions made, I finally wrote up a small shell script that just runs a couple of commands to adds any files that I care about to my restic repository and pushes the Restic repo up to my Hetzner storage box. I then added the shell script to my crontab so that it runs nightly and ensures that my offsite backups stay up to date. I have been using this solution now for a few months now and would strongly recommend it to anybody looking for a nice, simple offsite backup solution.

Other options

I was of course, very tempted by Backblaze and Crashplan, as they seem to provide a really simple plug and play service, however was deterred by the cost. From the research I did though, I think I would recomend them to anybody less inclined to setting up their own backup solution.

There are also other storage providers beyond Hetzner that you can go with if you’d like to roll your own solution like I did here, such as AWS and Azure’s cold storage options. I was personally dissuaded from using these due to their high cost if you might ever need to retrieve your backups.