Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Family photos & personal backup needs

  • A recurring use case is decades of family photos across phones, cameras, and scans.
  • Many replies insist this is a backup problem and needs a real strategy, not just storage.
  • Some argue that only a subset of data is truly “valuable,” especially for long‑term family memories; others note that even hobbyist photo collections can reach terabytes and need more robust planning.

NAS, sync tools & self‑hosted photo services

  • Common pattern: family NAS as central store, then offsite/cloud backup of the NAS.
  • Suggested stacks:
    • Nextcloud, Syncthing (with forks for Android/iOS), or Resilio Sync to collect photos from devices.
    • Photo‑oriented apps like Immich, PhotoPrism, ente.io, and iCloud Family for organization and sharing.
  • iOS background restrictions are seen as a pain point for tools like Syncthing.
  • Several setups pair a NAS (often ZFS) + Immich with daily encrypted backups to S3‑compatible or other cloud storage.

Backup complacency vs over‑engineering

  • Some are shocked by both individuals and billion‑euro companies having weak or untested backups, losing days of production data.
  • Others warn people also over‑think home backups: for many, slow restores are fine as long as data is safe.

BCDR, RPO/RTO & “don’t roll your own”

  • Professionals stress that backup ≠ disaster recovery; recovery time (RTO) and data loss window (RPO) matter for businesses.
  • Application‑consistent backups (e.g., via VSS, DB‑aware tools) are preferred over raw rsync or crash‑consistent snapshots, though for many home users snapshots are “good enough.”
  • There’s skepticism toward DIY enterprise‑grade BCDR; commercial solutions sell tested restore workflows and trust.

Ransomware, push vs pull & immutability

  • Strong emphasis on protecting backups from ransomware:
    • Prefer pull‑based backups or strictly append‑only push (no delete).
    • Use chrooted/jailed backup users, append‑only SSH commands, or WORM/readonly media.
    • Offline or rotated external drives remain a last‑line defense.

Tools, media reliability & testing

  • Popular tools mentioned: restic, Borg, zfs/btrfs snapshots, dirvish/rsync, UrBackup, Proxmox Backup Server, Arq, Backblaze, various clouds.
  • Disks are assumed to fail; ZFS scrubs, RAID1, and diverse drive models are recommended.
  • Multiple commenters stress “Schrödinger’s backups”: you must regularly test restores (even partial) to trust your system.