[haertig]

This thread re-activated my thinking about my own remote backup needs. Some needs had been ignored, put off, and not addressed as they should have been.

I run Linux, and that can be a problem with some cloud storage providers. They don't make a Linux client. I found a good solution by the name of "rclone". It has been around forever, highly respected, I had heard of it - but had forgotten it.

Yesterday I installed it and did some testing with it. I'm impressed enough to start using it to do my uploading/downloading. Encryption, I will probably use my standards - Veracrypt, Cryptomater, and KeePassXC. rclone does have encryption built in as well, but I do not know enough about that currently to (1) trust it, and (2) know if it is functionally what I want. I'll keep investigating it. As far as what provider to use for storage, I'm going to be using Google Drive. They give you a generous amount of free storage, and this is what several in my family already use. Google is one of the well known "spies" of the internet, so I never would put anything up there unless I had encrypted it personally, on my client end, not using any Google supplied software. This I can do. So I'll start out with storing some data up there. I don't have to worry about using their sync client since I'll be using rclone.

I started looking at what I might want to backup to the cloud. I have good backups here, but if a bomb were to drop on my house and obliterate everything inside, my existing remote backups would not cover things completely. They're on the patchy side at present. There are two classes of data that I want to backup. Class 1 is the frequently changing stuff, and stuff thta is accessed often. This is minimal in size relatively speaking. Then there's the massive stuff - photos, videos, ebooks, music. These eat up a lot of disk space. But the good thing is, they are typically "write once, update almost never, read infrequently, and not urgently". So it makes sense to me to NOT back these up to the cloud and pay for all the storage that would be required. These could safely be written to external hard drives, SSD's, SD cards, thumbdrives, etc. and stored in my Safe Deposit Box. Since this is basically "write once, keep forever" stuff I don't need to worry about routinely retrieving it from the Safe Deposit Box and updating it. I just add to it as I build up more of this type of media, and drive it over the the Safe Deposit Box as needed. I used to remotely back this "write once" stuff up over the internet (to my mom's place, not a cloud provider) so I didn't have to pay for the storage. But really, that was slinging a lot of content over the internet that really didn't require that. Now mom is gone and I don't have that option any more, unless I pair up with someone else as I mentioned in a previous post.

Given that the vast majority of data loss is either user error or a local hardware issue, my existing backups to separate servers (that are inside my house) is where I'll continue to retrieve most of my backups from. Those are fast, efficient, automatic, and already set up (for many years already). It is only the rare "the whole house burned down" scenario where I'll have to hit the remote backups to restore things. And in all honesty, I think it will be much easier, faster, and more secure to make the five minute drive over to my Safe Deposit Box and grab a handful of media than it will be to download terrabytes of data from some cloud provider over the internet. Safe Deposit Box storage is cheaper than cloud storage, and you can store other physical things in a securely locked box that you can't store in the cloud.

Anyway, this is my current line of re-thinking my needs that this thread prompted me to do. Subject to change as I research and think on it more.