Backup

The 3-2-1 backup guide on this site makes the case for an off-site copy without picking a specific home for it. That’s deliberate, because “off-site” covers everything from a hard drive at your parents’ house to a proper cloud object storage tier, and which one makes sense depends entirely on how you actually plan to use it. This article is the follow-up: assuming you’ve decided cloud is part of your off-site story, which service, and why. ...

A password manager is the one self-hosted app where “good enough” isn’t good enough. Every other app on your stack going down for a night is an inconvenience. Your vault going down, or worse, becoming unrecoverable, is every credential you have locked behind a box you can no longer reach. That raises the bar for how carefully you set this one up compared to, say, a media server or a dashboard. Vaultwarden makes the bar easy to clear, it’s a small, mature, low-resource app, but only if you actually do the hardening and backup steps instead of just running the container and calling it done. ...

Every data hoarder eventually hits the same wall: the array keeps growing, the electric bill for spinning a dozen drives 24/7 keeps growing with it, and the off-site backup story (see the 3-2-1 backup guide if you haven’t nailed that down yet) gets more expensive every time you add another few TB. At some point, usually somewhere past the 50-100TB mark, people start hearing the same suggestion from old-school sysadmins: buy a tape drive. It sounds like a joke. It isn’t. ...

Google Photos used to be the easy answer: unlimited storage, decent search, an app that just worked. That deal is gone, storage now counts against your Google One quota, prices have crept up, and the underlying trade was always the same one every free cloud photo service makes: your entire photo library, including the ones you’d rather not have scanned by an ad-tech company’s ML pipeline, lives on someone else’s servers under someone else’s terms. Immich and PhotoPrism are the two projects that have actually closed the gap between “self-hosted” and “something you’d trust with 15 years of family photos.” Picking between them comes down to a few real differences, not just which one has a nicer logo. ...

Every data hoarder eventually runs into the same uncomfortable fact: a hard drive can report a read as fully successful while quietly handing back the wrong bits. No error, no SMART warning, no crash. The file opens fine. It’s just wrong. That’s bit rot, and RAID redundancy alone does nothing to catch it, because RAID is built to survive a drive failing outright, not a drive lying to you about data it’s still perfectly willing to serve. ...

A Proxmox Backup Server job backs up entire VMs and containers, which covers you if a whole box dies. It does not, by itself, give you a clean, restorable copy of the actual data living inside your self-hosted apps, the Vaultwarden vault, the Paperless-ngx document store, the dozen docker-compose.yaml files and their bind-mounted config directories that took real time to get right. If your backup strategy stops at the hypervisor layer, you’re covered against hardware death but not against the more common failure: a bad update, a fat-fingered docker compose down -v, or a config file you meant to edit and instead overwrote. This is where an app-level backup tool earns its place alongside whatever you’re already doing at the VM/container level. ...

The 3-2-1 backup rule gets repeated so often it’s turned into a slogan: three copies of your data, on two different media types, with one copy off-site. It’s good advice. It’s also advice that was mostly written with a few hundred gigabytes of irreplaceable photos in mind, not the 50, 100, or 200TB array a serious data hoarder ends up running. At that scale, “just keep an off-site copy” stops being a checkbox and starts being a real infrastructure and cost decision. Here’s what each part of 3-2-1 actually means once your data won’t fit on a shelf of external drives anymore. ...