4 ways to set up an offsite backup system for your home server

If you starting a home serveryou probably already have your devices backup your data to your storage pools. But that’s not the only place you should keep backups, as the 3-2-1 backup rule means you should have one copy of your data in an off-site location. It could be a cloud storage service or a physical machine further away than your garage, but storing any truly important data comes with the cost of keeping it secure.

Whether you use full backups, incremental updates, synced folders, or even both, having an extra copy of your important data in an off-site location will help you get back on your feet if the worst happens to the data on your home server. . You can do this in several ways, but these are our favorites.

4

Have a NAS in a family member’s home

Send critical backups to a second server in a secure location.

Potentially the easiest and most cost-effective way to keep a backup of your home server in a remote location is to ask a trusted friend or family member if you can stash discreet NAS device in your home and periodically run backups on it. Running an incremental backup scheduled for a few hours when they won’t be using an Internet connection is the best way to avoid causing problems with their Internet experience. You can also use Wake-on-LAN Make sure your NAS device or file server is turned off before the backup takes place to save on energy costs.

Depending on your router hardware, you may need to change router provider with one that can work WireGuard for connecting to a storage server remotely. This way, you can also provide remote technical support to your family members without being subject to the whim of an ISP who might accidentally disable remote access by sending a router firmware update.

3

Set up Backblaze

A more cost-effective solution compared to other cloud storage providers.

Keeping a backup of your home server data offsite isn’t just about finding a place to store it. It’s also about software that simplifies the backup process, which is one of the main reasons I like Backblaze B2 cloud storage as an off-site option. You can set up backups for specific folders or files to store them securely in your company’s storage units.

Unlike regular cloud storage providers, where if you accidentally delete a file from your home server, it will disappear from the cloud drive, Backblaze is a true backup solution. This means that the copy in the storage modules will still be there, so you can restore it as soon as you realize your mistake. You get 10GB of free storage, but you’ll use it up pretty quickly if you’re backing up a home server. If you go over the free limit, it’s just $6 per TB of data per month, or you can get 20TB for $1,560 per year. This is more than enough for important data that you need to have access to at any time.

2

Use Amazon Glacier for less accessible data

For long-term storage of important data

While Backblaze and other cloud storage providers give you always-on access to your backup data, Amazon S3 Glacier storage works a little differently. It has three tiers of storage classes, all with different prices, with S3 Glacier Instant Retrival being the most expensive to use. This is because Amazon prices its long-term storage based on how quickly you need to access your data, and if you’re only storing backups, it makes sense to go with the cheapest tier.

With S3 Glacier’s archiving tiers, your data essentially goes into cold storage once it’s loaded. If you need access to these backups, you submit a request to AWS and they pull a temporary copy for the duration you specify. This can take a few minutes on the more expensive tier, or up to 72 hours on the cheapest Deep Archive tier.

It’s up to you to decide what data you can live without for up to three days. It’s quite common to use a combination of all three of these options: backing up data that requires immediate access to more expensive but more accessible tiers of cloud storage, as well as rarely used backups to S3 Glacier.

1

Use cold storage

Backups that no one can change are one way to keep your critical data safe.

Another option for backing up a home server offsite is to run cold storage with a set of hard drives on which you put archived data and then move it to another location. This has many benefits beyond the lower cost since you have no ongoing costs once you purchase the drives. The most important may be security, since no one will be able to access your data if the drives are not connected. As a result, you will also extend the life of the drives since they are not included and are subject to wear and tear.

If you choose your drives carefully from the start and use good data integrity practices, such as periodic checksumming and data auditing, you can store them in cold storage for a long time. And if you’re backing up a home server, you can rotate those drives from time to time to ensure the data in storage is always fresh and the drives aren’t left offline for too long and subject to things like bit rot.

Having a backup of your home server’s most important data ensures its safety.

Keeping one off-site backup of your home server data along with a second backup on another computer reduces the risk of catastrophic data loss in the event of an emergency. There are a number of reasons why data on your home devices can become corrupted or lost, and having a good backup strategy will prevent you from losing all your files and images if the worst happens. You can use any of these methods, or a combination of all four, to ensure that your backups don’t die in the event of a failure.