this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Continue to self host, create a yearly backup on external harddrive which you keep offline at a trusted family members house.
I do something similar
I have a raspberry pi and a HD, with daily rsync and snapshots (monthly retained indefinitely, weekly retained for a month, daily retained for a week). It's at family's house, connected to my home via WireGuard via a VPS. Tailscale (or anything really) would also work here.
It's a great setup! Just have some watchdog reboot if it can't talk to home (a simple cronjob with
ping -c1 home.lan || rebootor similar).Even our "slow" 35Mbps upload speed is way more than enough for incremental rsyncs of my Immich library. The initial sync was done in person, though.
Good enough. Simple, cheap. Brilliant.
Anyone reading this have any suggestions as to where we all can source cheap high-volume drives, such as refurbs pulled from upgraded old racks?
I'm looking to source a cheap trusted family member if anyone has one going?
Location?
Lots of families seem to be relocating these days for some reason... Maybe try reaching out there. 👍
https://serverpartdeals.com/
I have several of these and they been solid, before I would get refurb or open box from amazon and send them back if the smart failed, guessing a lot of people just stick their old drives in the box and return it so it wasn't great
Yeah serverpartdeals is legit. Between work and home, I think I've tested & deployed 150+ drives from them over the last 3yrs. No duds, no failures, no complaints. Great customer service on the corp side for big orders, too. 10/10 would recommend.
I got one from goHardDrive on eBay (link). It was cheap enough, looks flawless, and knock on wood has been working fine.
Googling around, the brand gets...mixed reviews. My use case is such that of this drive fails it's not a big deal.
I remember before, you could use crashplan to easily backup to a computer at a friend's house and vice versa. Anyone know any similar tools? The biggest requirement would be that it's easy enough to use that someone who doesn't know what "self hosting" is can do it.
Syncthing.
https://syncthing.net/
But keeping the service live at all times isn’t really a backup.
As someone who tried syncthing with their non-self hosting friends, let me tell you, that edit folder option is terrifying for the general public lol
I guess you can do "local"backups then syncthing them over, but thats a bit contrived
BitTorrent sync.
https://duplicacy.com/