The easiest offsite backup would be any cloud platform. Downside is that you aren't gonna own your own data like if you deployed your own system.

Next option is an external SSD that you leave at your work desk and take home once a week or so to update.

The most robust solution would be to find a friend or relative willing to let you set up a server in their house. Might need to cover part of their electric bill if your machine is hungry.

There's some really good options in this thread, just remember that whatever you pick. Unless you test your backups, they are as good as not existing.

Syncthing to a pi at my parents place.

I have a job, and the office is 35km away. I get a locker in my office.

I have two backup drives, and every month or so, I will rotate them by taking one into the office and bringing the other home. I do this immediately after running a backup.

The drives are LUKS encrypted btrfs. Btrfs allows snapshots and compression. LUKS enables me to securely password protect the drive. My backup job is just a btrfs snapshot followed by an rsync command.

I don't trust cloud backups. There was an event at work where Google Cloud accidentally deleted an entire company just as I was about to start a project there.

I don't 🙃

Look into storj and tardigrade. It's a crypto thing, but don't get scared. You back up to S3 compatible endpoints and it's super cheap (and pay with USD credit card)

If you are gonna go for TrueNAS, try Storj with TrueNAS Cloud task. TrueNAS made a partnership with Storj and the price is very good. https://www.truenas.com/truecloud-backup/

TlDr; The data is encrypted with restic and sent to Storj S3 storage that is further fragmenting it (and encrypting it too - so double encryption) into multiple pieces (with redundancy) and storing on other peoples TrueNASes (you can also provide your unused space btw and gain some small money back).

I am in process of setting this up (already run a working test backup) and I didn't find anything that's better than this integrated solution. Very cool!

I have two large (8 Bay) Synology NAS. They backup certain data between each other and replicate internally and push to Back blaze. $6/mo.

If you use ZFS this becomes easy, because you can do incremental backups at the block level.

I have my home lab server and do snapshots and sends to a server at my fathers house. Then I also have an external drive that I snapshot to as well.

I use borg backup. It, and another tool called restic, are meant for creating encrypted backups. Further, it can create backups regularly and only backup differences. This means you could take a daily backup without making new copies of your entire library. They also allow you to, as part of compressing and encrypting, make a backup to a remote machine over ssh. I think you should start with either of those.

One provider thats built for being a cloud backup is borgbase. It can be a location you backup a borg (or restic I think) repository. There are others that are made to be easily accessed with these backup tools.

Lastly, I'll mention that borg handles making a backup, but doesn't handle the scheduling. Borgmatic is another tool that, given a yml configuration file, will perform the borgbackup commands on a schedule with the defined arguments. You could also use something like systemd/cron to run a schedule.

Personally, I use borgbackup configured in NixOS (which makes the systemd units for making daily backups) and I back up to a different computer in my house and to borgbase. I have 3 copies, 1 cloud and 2 in my home.

I got my parents to get a NAS box, stuck it in their basement. They need to back up their stuff anyway. I put in 2 18 TB drives (mirrored BTRFS raid1) from server part deals (peeps have said that site has jacked their prices, look for alts). They only need like 4 TB at most. I made a backup samba share for myself. It’s the cheapest symbology box possible, their software to make a samba share with a quota.

I then set up a wireguard connection on an RPi, taped that to the NAS, and wireguard to the local network with a batch script. Mount the samba share and then use restic to back up my data. It works great. Restic is encrypted, I don’t have to pay for storage monthly, their electricity is cheap af, they have backups, I keep tabs on it, everyone wins.

Next step is to go the opposite way for them, but no rush on that goal, I don’t think their basement would get totaled in a fire and I don’t think their house (other than the basement) would get totaled in a flood.

If you don’t have a friend or relative to do a box-at-their-house (peeps might be enticed with reciprocal backups), restic still fits the bill. Destination is encrypted, has simple commands to check data for validity.

Rclone crypt is not good enough. Too many issues (path length limits, password “obscured” but otherwise there, file structure preserved even if names are encrypted). On a VPS I use rclone to be a pass-through for restic to backup a small amount of data to a goog drive. Works great. Just don’t fuck with the rclone crypt for major stuff.

Lastly I do use rclone crypt to upload a copy of the restic binary to the destination, as the crypt means the binary can’t be fucked with and the binary there means that is all you need to recover the data (in addition to the restic password you stored safely!).

LTO8 in box elsewhere

The price per terabyte became viable when a drive was on sale for half off at a local retailer.

Works well and it was a fun learning experience.

I'm just skipping that. How am I going to backup 48TB on an off-site backup?!

Rsync to a Hetzner storage box. I dont do ALL my data, just the nextcloud data. The rest is...linux ISOs... so I can redownload at my convenience.

I have an external storage unit a couple kilometers away and two 8TB hard drives with luks+btrfs. One of them is always in the box and after taking backups, when I feel like it, I detach the drive and bike to the box to switch. I'm currently researching btrbk for updating the backup drive on my pc automatically, it's pretty manual atm. For most scenarios the automatic btrfs snapshots on my main disks are going to be enough anyway.

My friend has 1G/1G Internet. I have a rsync cron job backing up there 2 times a week.

It has a 8TB NVMe drive that I use bulk data backup and a 2TB os drive for VM stuff.

As others have said, use tools like borg and restic.

Shop around for cloud storage with good pricing for your use-case. Many charge for different usage patterns, like restoring data or uploading.

Check out storj.io, I like their pricing - they charge for downloading/restore (IIRC), and I figure that's a cost I can live with if I need to restore.

Otherwise I keep 3 local copies of data:

1 is live, and backed up to storj.io

2 is mirrored from 1 every other week

3 is mirrored from 1 every other week, opposite 2

This works for my use-case, where I'm concerned about local failures and mistakes (and don't trust my local stores enough to use a backup tool), but my data doesn't change a lot in a week. If I were to lose 1 week of changes, it would be a minor issue. And I'm trusting my cloud backup to be good (I do test it quarterly, and do a single file restore test monthly).

This isn't an ideal (or even recommended approach), just works with the storages I currently have, and my level of trust of them.

I used to say restic and b2; lately, the b2 part has become more iffy, because of scuttlebutt, but for now it's still my offsite and will remain so until and unless the situation resolves unfavorably.

Restic is the core. It supports multiple cloud providers, making configuration and use trivial. It encrypts before sending, so the destination never has access to unencrypted blobs. It does incremental backups, and supports FUSE vfs mounting of backups, making accessing historical versions of individual files extremely easy. It's OSS, and a single binary executable; IMHO it's at the top of its class, commercial or OSS.

B2 has been very good to me, and is a clear winner for this is case: writes and space are pennies a month, and it only gets more expensive if you're doing a lot of reads. The UI is straightforward and easy to use, the API is good; if it weren't for their recent legal and financial drama, I'd still unreservedly recommend them. As it is, you'd have you evaluate it yourself.

I have 2x 18TB HDD drives which I sync weekly and store in separate rooms.

I use Backblaze for offsite.

I use syncthing to push data offsite encrypted and with staggered versioning, to a tiny ITX box I run at family member's house

My ratchet way of doing it is Backblaze. There is a docker container that lets you run the unlimited personal plan on Linux by emulating a windows environment. They let you set an encryption key so that they can’t access your data.

I’m sure there are a lot more professional and secure ways to do it, but my way is cheap, easy, and works.