- 27 Dec, 2025 *
"Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it." ― Linus Torvalds
It’s holiday season, AKA the season of break-ins, fried electronics and exhausted angry humans making mistakes. But you have backups, right? Right?
People (IMO) fall into two categories: either YOLO no backups no restores, or something costly and so complicated that’s probably broken already on day 2 due to lack of maintenance. (Especially for professionals.)
This here is my approach for my own data. It’s a rant ab…
- 27 Dec, 2025 *
"Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it." ― Linus Torvalds
It’s holiday season, AKA the season of break-ins, fried electronics and exhausted angry humans making mistakes. But you have backups, right? Right?
People (IMO) fall into two categories: either YOLO no backups no restores, or something costly and so complicated that’s probably broken already on day 2 due to lack of maintenance. (Especially for professionals.)
This here is my approach for my own data. It’s a rant about keeping it simple, and engineering it from first principles.
Consider your data
Mine is this:
- bulk: a couple of TB of slow-changing photos, videos and other semi-irreplaceable files (yet I’d probably live if I lost it all)
- critical: a few MB of metadata, passwords and the like (I really don’t want to lose this)
- most of this is on sometimes-on devices (ie laptops) but I only have a small handful of them
- system data is irrelevant as it’s NixOS with Git, backed up locally and remotely
- embedded things like my router get config dumps into a local file after every config change
No third category, no 57 bespoke servers at home.
Consider your threat model
YMMV, but mine is the following:
- Someone breaking in and stealing ALL my hardware, or a fire taking it all out
- Google locking me out of my account
- Me screwing up and fat-fingering something
- Silent data corruption / hardware failure
No state actors, no evil maids.
Consider your restores
The threat model means I will need both full-site restores (bulk data, hw failure), and point-in-time from a key set of files (critical data, fat-fingering things without noticing).
Retention is "as long as I can without running out of space" which is quite long considering the bulk data doesn’t change often.
This leads to a philosophy
Mine is
- It’s gotta be cheap and simple. I can’t be arsed to maintain something complicated at home, and I want restores to be easily doable when all my infra has failed.
- I need to test restores regularly, because nobody needs backups, we all need restores.
- As automated as it gets without going overboard (I run one script per device – full control over timing but otherwise nothing to remember)
- Full disk encryption locally is good enough for bulk data. Anything offsite needs to be encrypted first – no trusting some cloud provider’s keys.
Which then results in an approach
- rclone can back up Google Drive locally, results get backed up on a second local machine (but not offsite again as it already has an offsite copy)
- "bulk" local data gets a second copy on a second local machine
- "critical" data gets (locally-encrypted) cloud backups in addition
- I prefer raw files to archives, because restoring becomes trivial when in panic mode. Thus I wrote a tool called duckup that does a simple and cheap "historical backups via rsync" thing.
- A recurring Google Calendar task (!) is used as a soft scheduler to tell me to run the scripts when convenient.
What’s work in progress
- Not all of my Google life is covered: I’ve found no good way to back up Google Photos, and I should probably set up something IMAP or API-based for Gmail and Calendar. There’s Takeout but it’s tedious and manual.
- Offsite backups in the cloud are expensive on the TB level, so I’m still working that one out.
- Restore testing is limited to the occasional manual test, but I don’t have enough hardware to actually do a full site restore.
- Some other cloud services I use lack backups. I managed to get a track list out of Spotify, but not the files. Maybe Anna will sort this for me.