I have a server running Debian with 24 TB of storage. I would ideally like to back up all of it, though much of it is torrents, so only the ones with low seeders really need backed up. I know about the 321 rule but it sounds like it would be expensive. What do you do for backups? Also if anyone uses tape drives for backups I am kinda curious about that potentially for offsite backups in a safe deposit box or something.
TLDR: title.
Edit: You have mentioned borg and rsync, and while borg looks good, I want to go with rsync as it seems to be more actively maintained. I would like to also have my backups encrypted, but rsync doesn’t seem to have that built in. Does anyone know what to do for encrypted backups?
I’ve been using Borg and Hetzner Storage Box. There are some small VPS hosts that actually beat Hetzner’s pricing but I have been happy with Hetzner so am staying there for now. With 24TB of data you could also look at Hetzner’s SX64 dedicated server. It has a 6 core Ryzen cpu and 4x 16TB HDD’s for 81 euro/month. You could set it up as RAID 10 which would give you around 29 TiB of usable storage, and then you also have a fairly beefy processor that you can use for transcoding and stuff like that. You don’t want to seed from it since Hetzner is sticky about complaints that they might get.
Tape drives are too expensive unless you have 100s of TB of data, I think. Hard drives are too unreliable. If you leave one in a closet for a few years, there’s a good chance it won’t spin back up.
You can probably find something cheaper from their auction servers.
I’ve got a storage VPS with HostHatch for my backups. It’s one of their Black Friday deals from a few years ago - 10TB storage for $10/month. Not sure they’ll offer that pricing again, but they did have something similar for around double the price during sales last year (still a good deal!)
The drives are expensive, and some manufacturers have expensive proprietary software, but the tapes themselves are cheaper per TB than hard drives, and they usually have a 20 or 30 year life guarantee. People seem to think tapes is old technology but modern tapes can fit 18TB uncompressed (they say 45 TB compressed but idk).
The default tier of AWS glacier uses tape, which is why data retrieval takes a few hours from when you submit the request to when you can actually download the data, and costs a lot.
AFAIK Glacier is unlikely to be tape based. A bunch of offline drives is more realistic scenario. But generally it’s not public knowledge unless you found some trustworthy source for the tape theory?