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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Question about safety of my backup solution (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by Antar3s86@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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Hi all! Recently I decided to ditch Dropbox because the app simply stopped working reliably on my end (after being a customer for 12 years). It puzzles me how they could drive such a great product into the ground…

After reading a lot on self hosted clouds and many threads here on Reddit, I found that the best solution for me was to spin up Resilio sync. This is my current setup in the network:

iMac Pro with selective sync in real time
MacBook Pro with selective sync in real time
QNAP NAS at home fully synced in real time
QNAP NAS at work fully synced in real time

Only the NAS at work is always on. My backup solution looks like this:

QNAP NAS at work syncs to externally mounted disk once a day (one way mirror)
QNAP NAS at work syncs to Backblaze once a day (one way mirror)

Now, one loophole I discovered was that if I accidentally delete a file, it will disappear immediately from all the real time synced devices. And if I do not correct for the mistake before the mirroring to Backblaze or the external drive at work, the accidentally deleted file will be gone forever.

My question is how to solve that loophole. Unfortunately I need to do active mirror syncs for the backups because it would become simply too expensive to do versioning as I have lots of traffic in the synced files (100 GB per day, with many additions and deletions). One way I thought about was to trigger the Backblaze backup manually, so that I get a chance to at least review the current state of my file system before mirroring it. But any other suggestions would be highly appreciated.

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[–] dcabines@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A mirror is not a backup, like you've noticed. Use rsync for your backups if you don't care about versioning or snapshots. You can run it on a schedule to copy files to your backup, but not delete anything. Then you can manually run it with the delete option turned on when you're ready.

[–] Antar3s86@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Ah nice! I did not know that rsync has a 'delete option'. I guess what I could do with QNAP HBS is to set up multiple backup jobs: Copy over everything every day, while retaining all files and trigger the mirror option manually when space becomes an issue. Thanks!! 😊

[–] Antar3s86@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

[–] Carnildo@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

QNAP NAS at work syncs to externally mounted disk once a day (one way mirror)

You can get cheap versioning here: instead of syncing to one external disk, get another disk or three and swap between them on a regular basis. As long as you realize that ransomware has encrypted your data before you've cycled through the entire set, you'll still have an old backup you can recover from.

[–] Antar3s86@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the suggestions. Indeed this would make things safer. However, I forgot to mention that the external drive is an integrated storage pool on the NAS at work, so I can't really iterate manually between the drives. :/