this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
54 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

60281 readers
629 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi all, I'm just getting my feet wet in self hosting and have a plan to start with Nextcloud on a Pi 4 for photo backups, and then try other things for calendar, phone backups, media hosting, etc.

One thing I worry about is losing my data. I have heard "if it's not backed up in two locations, it's not backed up." I'm curious what all of you do for backing up the setup. Remote backup to hard drives in the garage? Pay for cloud backup and encrypt it? Just another backup site over wifi in the house?

I'd be most afraid of losing photos and if there were a house fire or something. So my inital thought was a way of backing up to a server in my detached garage in a weather resistent container, but I want to know what you all think. Thanks for any insight.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Cyber@feddit.uk 7 points 7 months ago

I see lots of solutions here, but some explanation of the basics are missing for someone starting out... this is not meant to sound preachy...

RAID is not a backup. It's just better hardware fault tolerance. Delete does the same thing on RAID as it does one 1 drive.

Everyone syncs / copies / duplicates files somewhere, but you need a way of finding the previous backup in case something was deleted. This can be done with various ways / tech, but the point is - have some history not just 1 copy. Many pointers to 3-2-1 in here, but that also doesn't mean 3 copies of just today's data...

Backups are nothing without Restores. Test the backups. Various ways, but do it. Often.

And consider what you're backing up and why.. ie just your data? (Ie photos), or all the config files, databases, operating systems, etc to do a full restore on new metal. If the latter, I recommend keeping your data separate from the OS / config files, etc.

Source: decades of tech disasters ๐Ÿ˜