Overview
If your like me and you run a substantial home infrastructure, you know that backing it up is very important. How do you accomplish it however? A single HDD plugged into a NAS? A RAID array? A cloud backup service (Backblaze, Google Drive, etc.)? All of these by themselves fail to live up to the needs for a solid backup strategy. Backups to the point that you can wholly delete your infra in one location and still be just fine. To some people this level of self hosting in the home is ridiculous, costs to much or bears little fruit. In my opinion it is essential to data sovereignty, ownership and honing oneâs craft.
Why not cloud services
So why canât I use Dropbox, or Google Drive or Onedrive. You totally can, just not as a single copy instantiation. It may surprise some people but the cloud providers themselves do not backup your data, They only store it and sometimes replicate it. I am pulling the majority of my information from some of the sources in our sources section. Most of these links detail the legal/terms and conditions of major cloud providers often citing something like âshared responsibility modelâ noting that the user needs to backup their own data and that in fact, the cloud providers DO NOT guarantee your data.
Key here is that nobody cares about your data more than you do. Nobody cares about those family photos and important documents more than you do. So keep them secure and safe yourself with a multi part backup strategy.
iCloud
It is your responsibility to maintain appropriate alternate backup of your information and data.
Microsoft
After digging deeper into Googleâs Terms of Service, there actually isnât any clear language that straight-up tells users they need to back up their data somewhere else. That said, itâs still really important to point out that Google has a long history of locking people out of their accounts over what they believe are ToS violations. Now, thatâs not the same thing as âa data center went down and everyone lost their files,â but from the userâs perspective, the end result can be the same: sudden data loss with no easy recovery.
In my opinion, Google has fully embraced the whole âyou are the productâ mindset. Thatâs not exactly breaking news to anyone with a Google account or anyone whoâs been paying even a little attention over the past few years.
Google flags dad for CSAM - No Crime Committed
And honestly, these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are countless stories of Google accounts getting locked and completely disrupting peopleâs lives. When you stop and think about how much is tied to a single Google accountâemail, photos, documents, logins. Itâs kind of terrifying.
Dropbox
Although my strategy may be a bit too much, it at minimum keeps my data safe. Nobody cares about my data more than I do.
Implementation
My Implementation conforms and exceeds the 3-2-1 backup strategy for my personal data. I implement it as follows:
3 - Copies of the Data: Cleary from the diagram shown above I have 3 different copies of the data with a 4th one that is immutable from the others. 2 - Different Mediums/Storage Devices: I use both Cloud Object Storage and HDD/SSDs as well. 1 - Backup Copies off-site: Definitely meet the offsite rule for each of my major sites.
I use a mixture of clouds in order to accomplish this, I have my home datacenter where I run the primary copies that I typically interact with and modify/upload to. I have a secondary site where I lease a bare metal server from Hivelocity. This allows me to host secondary copies and services with a trusted DC provider so that way when my primary house is down (like when I’m moving) I still have full access to all the self-hosted services my family is used to.
I would highly recommend Hivelocity as a hosting provider, they have phenomenal pricing and outstanding support. You can run virtual servers, dedicated hosted servers and virtual servers as well. If you want please use my referral link as it will slightly defray my hosting costs Hivelocity Hosting Referral.
Benefits
This strategy ensures complete ownership and control of my data at every stage of its life. No single cloud provider, service agreement, or platform policy change can put my data at risk. I decide where my data lives, how itâs protected, and when itâs deleted or restored. Unlike consumer cloud services, this approach eliminates vendor lock-in and dependency on opaque internal replication policies that are outside my control.
In addition most data loss is not caused by hardware failure, itâs caused by people screwing something up. My backup strategy allows for someone (probably me) to screw something up bad and independently restore it from one of my other sites. By maintaining versioned and immutable backups, I can recover from mistakes without panic, downtime, or permanent loss. Even a full infrastructure wipe is recoverable.
Conclusion
In the end, when I got into the IT Field I began looking around at how I was storing my data. This led me to look at who can store my stuff. Originally I was all in on Google but as I went along I became disillusioned with Google from a privacy perspective. I then moved my stuff to my own NAS and since then it has grown into a massive interconnected network of Family Photos, Documents and miscellaneous data. This is one of my passions so I actually really really enjoy doing this kind of work on my own time in addition to doing it in my professional life. I would highly recommend people host some of their own data. I will in the future most likely document and workout some ways you can do this on a very low cost basis.