3-2-1 Backup Strategy with restic and Backblaze B2
20 points by zk
20 points by zk
I have a similar setup and here's my restic script. However, I think that 3-2-1 is a bit of an overkill. Statistically, one local copy, especially if you drive is in mirror mode (RAID1) and one remote is more than enough.
meta: Backblaze is dirt cheap, but it's been losing money since 2007. Isn't that amazing, that a company can be losing money for ~19 years and still be alive and kickin because VC money? I mean, I'm happy that is cheap, but at the time I feel sorry for smaller players in the market that try to compete without advanced features like the ones AWS s3 offers.
I've been keeping a RAID (ZFS) plus an extra disk that is explicitly exempt from any mirroring, just rsynced to. This is after I've blown up a RAID5 as a teenager, losing priceless family photos. To be fair, I did run into a kernel bug when modifying the array. Still, it taught me that RAID is not backup, the hard way. Now, I like to have a remote copy, but a local one that is totally decoupled config-wise from the main store cannot hurt, either.
I do mostly the same, but I've now migrated to Hetzner Storage Box in an attempt to get off US tech. As a person living in the EU, it seems like a reasonable course of action. Restic made the switch simple, even though I had to reupload everything from scratch and it took a month to do so.
One issue with SFTPing stuff to Hetzner was that the transfer would get stuck at some point. However, configuring restic to use rclone as the transport seems to have rectified it, and seemingly dead TCP connections no longer occur.
One key thing I did was to actually test the restore operation. I rented a cloud instance and took a day to pull the data back in and look at some samples. They seemed OK, so now I have some confidence that the same process can be repeated if needed.
I'm curious why the author chose B2+restic rather than Backblaze's own backup product. It seems implied that it's so Backblaze can never see the author's encryption keys, but I wonder if there are other reasons as well.
As far as I can tell, Backblaze's backup app is for desktops only, not servers. Also there is no Linux version.
EDIT: this also means Windows users get an "unlimited" offer, while Linux pays by the gigabyte.
One of the nice aspects of Restic is that it supports multiple back-end destinations for your data. I've done something very similar to the author, and basically everything "just works". One config, essentially, but to one local SSD, one Odroid HC2, and B2.