I’m in the process of building my own backup solution.
What I have now are three encrypted external hard drives where I put all the passwords, writing, tax documents, photos, videos, and anything that I want to hold onto. Every three months or so, I will use rsync to update the backups and md5sum to check their integrity. I also have three pen drives that contain my passwords, gpg and ssh keys, and the most important documents. These I backup whenever there’s been a few changes to these files and I keep one on my desk, one in my backback, and one in my car.
This setup gives me some reasonable protection from hardware failure. The pen drives also give me a little bit of safety from keeping some data offsite.
All of this is driven using LUKS encryption, rsync, and md5sum because I don’t want to worry about tools/formats becoming abandonware and I also want to avoid coding custom solutions as much as possible.
Going forward, I want to:
Automate the manual bits, so I can run these backups at least once a month. More often for the pen drives. It would be great if I could just plug these into a hub and run a script that would copy all the right files to the right places and run some integrity checks.
Look into an offsite solution. I looks like it’s possible to get a VPS for <$60/year, which I could use as an offsite, encrypted hard drive essentially. I could then use this as a “hot” backup, updating it even every few days, and use the physical backups and “cooler” backups, which I backup once a month.
I’m in the process of building my own backup solution.
What I have now are three encrypted external hard drives where I put all the passwords, writing, tax documents, photos, videos, and anything that I want to hold onto. Every three months or so, I will use rsync to update the backups and md5sum to check their integrity. I also have three pen drives that contain my passwords, gpg and ssh keys, and the most important documents. These I backup whenever there’s been a few changes to these files and I keep one on my desk, one in my backback, and one in my car.
This setup gives me some reasonable protection from hardware failure. The pen drives also give me a little bit of safety from keeping some data offsite.
All of this is driven using LUKS encryption, rsync, and md5sum because I don’t want to worry about tools/formats becoming abandonware and I also want to avoid coding custom solutions as much as possible.
Going forward, I want to:
Automate the manual bits, so I can run these backups at least once a month. More often for the pen drives. It would be great if I could just plug these into a hub and run a script that would copy all the right files to the right places and run some integrity checks.
Look into an offsite solution. I looks like it’s possible to get a VPS for <$60/year, which I could use as an offsite, encrypted hard drive essentially. I could then use this as a “hot” backup, updating it even every few days, and use the physical backups and “cooler” backups, which I backup once a month.