I have a couple of local copies of my media collection, but in case of my house burning down in a fire i would like to not have to rebuild my entire media collection. rsync.net offers some fairly reasonable storage prices (i guess there are many other good options as well).
Would you guys have any second thoughts on storing the entirety of your media collection on a remote server like that unencrypted?
Is it rsync in general you wouldnt or rsync.net?
Never heard of restic so i will definitely need to check this out. I was not planning on having a solution that is continuously running but rather dumping everything there once and then sync new file maybe once a month or something.
rsync by itself provides no encryption, and i wouldn’t use just rsync by itself. That’s probably what he meant.
You should use something else with rsync that encrypts the data before uploading it to a server that you don’t own physically.
Or use restic, which takes care of the uploading part too, so you can skip using rsync altogether.
I have no opinion about rsync.net. I’d check which services restic supports; there are several, and it is it supports rsync.net and that’s what you want to use, you’re golden. Or, use another backup tool that has encryption-by-default and does support rsync.net - there are a couple of options.
I would just never store any data that wasn’t meant for public consumption unencrypted on someone else’s servers. I make an exception for my VPS, but that’s only because I’m more paranoid about exposing my LAN that putting my email on a VPS.
restic, and other backup tools, are generally not always on. You run them; they back up. If you run them only one a month, that’s how often they run. The remote mounting is just a nice feature when you want to grab a single file from one of the backups.
What you’re describing is a classic backup use-case. I’m recommending the easiest, cheapest, most reliable offsite solution I’ve used. restic has been around for years, and has a lot of users and a lot of eyeballs look at it, and it’s OSS. There are even GUIs for it, if you’re not comfortable with the CLI. B2 is generally well-regarded, is fairly easy to figure out, and has also been around for ages. Together, they make a solid combo. I also backup with restic to a local disk and use that for accessing history - B2 is just, as you say, in case of a fire, or theft, I suppose.
thanks, thats very helpful!
One (maybe stupid) question - since restic encrypts, does it do this in transfer or would i need to have additional space on my local hard drives for the encrypted archive?
edit: got an answer to this above: does not require intermediate storage! :)