Ask HN: Cheap/effective way to manage physical backups of cloud files?
I have my applications and files synchronize to a SaaS cloud file storage. I'd like maintain a physical copy in case of termination by the cloud provider.
What's the most cheap/effective way to manage physical/local backups that are synchronized with cloud storage provider. I'd prefer not to use another service like BackBlaze. You can build your own NAS, but for a much simpler way to start, buy couple of external drives and use Stable bit Drive pool application, along with https://github.com/rclone/rclone If your cloud storage is supported by rclone, you can use that to mount the storage and then back it up, locally or to an S3 storage at a different provider. That’s how I backup my wife’s and daughter’s OneDrive, using rclone and restic. Synchronization is not backup, learn the difference. For backup I'd choose a cold storage based on spinning disks, these things hold for 20 years unpowered with no problem. No SSDs - these fail after few years in cold storage. Agreed, synchronisation is great but is dangerous as your only strategy, otherwise a silly deletion locally means complete loss. I only synchronise active work, and backup everything locally onto hard usb drives, and periodically onto a drive held off-site. Do you have a server setup to manage backups to local HDDs? Or do you periodically plugin drives for overnight backups? Get a qnap or synology, both have apps to sync from S3 compat cloud iirc. Thanks for the quick response. Would prefer not to buy specialized hardware.