Hard drives in an old Mionix mouse box padded with bubble wrap, regularly swapped between 2 locations.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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I do this as well, offsite USB drive copy of backups from my PBS server that gets rotated every week for 4 weeks.
I only have a couple TB of important or irreplaceable data. I'm not backing up music or shows, I can just download that if I need it.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
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Borgbase - 1TB for $90 a year but they have smaller options. I then use Restic as my previous Borg setup kept stopping and couldn't figure out why
Also use Borgbase for 25$/year for 250GB. Additionally my data is saved via Syncthing to several devices.
The cheapest options I've found over the years are mostly black Friday sales on lifetime plans. Be careful who you trust, of course. There are lots of scammy ones out there, but there are also some reputable companies that have been around a good long while still offering lifetime plans. Check reviews before buying.
Over the years I've picked up cheap(ish) lifetime memberships with pCloud, Koofr, and Filen. I've already gotten my money's worth out of them.
I use Borg to create encrypted backups on an external HD, and then I periodically sync that to cloud providers. I prefer E2EE services but it's not a strict requirement for backups since Borg encrypts them anyway.
On Windows I recommend Kopia instead of Borg, at least until Borg gets an official stable windows build (planned for 2.0, currently in beta)
I exclude most things I could re-download like games and movies so 1TB covers my needs pretty well.
Amazon Glacier at like US$23/month for around 10 TB. It’s going to be a nightmare expense to pull it all back out though, especially after building a new NAS at these current prices.
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Dell Wyse 5070 off ebay. 2TB nvme in an external case I had laying around (just so happened to have been shuffling hardware around on other computers). Gave it to a relative who has their own setup with a battery backup and stuff. Tailscale and Duplicacy. 1.5 years and only issue I bumped into was the first external case I bought was cheap and bad. Went with something slightly more reputable and it's been rock solid since.
I don’t use it but I would recommend Kopia due to its content-defined chunking, deduplication, etc. I’m writing a fork of it that allows any Rclone adapter to work as the frontend or backend but it won’t be released for quite some time.
Otherwise I sync most my files to Backblaze by hand from time to time using Rclone and client-side encryption.
For my needs, I just use a Hetzner Storage Share and nextcloudcmd on a timer. I started doing that mostly because I already paid for the hosted Nextcloud instance and I like that it does file versioning for me and that it provides an easy to use GUI to restore files.
I use some free one but use cryptomator
I see a lot of people using restic here. However, restic has no support for object locking. Depending on the backup source, an attack on the storage location itself is probable (e. g. via ransomware).
I think rustic is currently discussing implementing support for object locking, and Kopia has it already.
None of the solutions have had an official audit yet, and at least Kopia defaults to AES-GCM, where I'd really love for an auditor to tell me there are no issues with nonce reuse, but switching to ChaChaPoly-1305 is an option.
If that matters depends a lot on the individual, just something to keep in mind.
I have my important server stuff (docker and immich etc) duped via syncthing to an old external USB drive attached to my office mac which then has Backblaze Personal Backup running. That backs it all up with no storage limit for £70/year on their 2 year plan.
The only downside is if the drive isn't connected for a few days, it checks it all again on reconnection.
I have about 4TB of files most of the time.
This way I have 3 copies of my files: 2 local, 1 remote.
EDIT: forgot that I also have 1yr retention on the files so in theory I can grab anything that I deleted up to 1yr ago.