Laptop backup strategy, the paranoid way
My laptop (called Juniperus) has a 4Tb NVMe drive occupied at 75%, content is roughly distributed as such :
- Videos – 52 %
- Pictures – 12 %
- Documents – 11 %
- Music – 8 %
- Downloads – 1 %
- Other – 19 %
Having lost a hard drive when I was 16 and having cried a river about it (it was a Maxtor 40Gb on a sunny summer's day)... I now have a strong backup policy. They are spread in 4 places using 3 different backup technologies.
| Location | Storage Size | Software |
| Garden (near-remote) | 1Tb (MicroSD) | rsync |
| Laundry Room | 4Tb (SSD), ZFS RAID | Proxmox Backup Server |
| Safe | 5Tb (HDD) | borg |
| Office (remote) | 4Tb (SSD) | Proxmox Backup Server |
Garden
This server (called Tsuga) runs Debian and uses a 1Tb Micro SD. It is powered by a PoE hat. The aluminium enclosure only has one RJ45 sealed connector. The enclosure has been sealed using a special sealant, and also contains a bag of moisture absorbant.
Due to the limited capacity (1Tb minus Debian), I exclude a lot of heavy stuff on rsync.
Main risk mitigated : partial house fire
It doesn't have an internal fan and tends to follow the outside temperature +30°C.
Laundry Room
It's a Minisforum HM50 called Cephalotaxus, serving both as a PVE host and a PBS host.
PVE has a dedicated NVMe drive. PBS exposes a ZFS datastore from a mirror of Samsung 860 QVO 4Tb and Samsung 870 QVO 4Tb.
This allows for a full backup using proxmox-backup-client on my laptop. Backups are incremental and differential. I use the --change-detection-mode=metadata to improve on performances.
The backup being done in Wifi, I exclude a lot of heavy stuff, namely Movies and TV Series.
Main risk mitigated : ssd failure, accidental data deletion
This server has a 15°C seasonal variability, due to its close proximity to the solar inverter, and the laundry room not being heated. The room gets down to 13° in winter and up to 30° in summer.
Safe
Stored in a safe is a Seagate 2,5" drive, in an external self-powered enclosure. For this backup I use borg, which is differential and incremental. This is an integral backup.
Main risk mitigated : ssd-related mass failures, house robbery
Office
This server called Juglans is an old Optiplex 3060 Micro (low power), running Proxmox Backup Server with a dedicated 4Tb SSD. It has a replication job to pull backups from Cephalotaxus. It is located at my work office, 5km away from my house.
Main risk mitigated : complete and catastrophic house and garden fire
Why not use any S3-compatible provider ?
I have no trust in any of them and can't be bothered with encryption. No, actually I like and do use encryption a lot, but when it comes to backups I favor data integrity above anything else. My safe already contains many encryption keys, if the house was to burn, I'd loose the backup encryption keys along with it. I would therefore have to have a backup policy for the encryption keys themselves. This is perfectly manageable in a pro situation, but as my home solution I'm not prepared to go into these lengths.