[mjevans]

That is actually the cheapest way over time.

If you're able to tag stuff you know you want to keep and it's a smaller set you could look in to something like Backblaze B2 (previously a featured story on HN); the storage costs are relatively moderate, but restoration from it will cost you.

I haven't yet heard of any solution along the lines of "Rent a (large) NAS for a month" for those times that you're upgrading your array and need to switch filesystem formats. Having that option would make the juggling much easier and safer. Looking at the S3 storage and bandwidth costs I imagine there is actually a market to be served by such a product.

Maybe renting one of those higher end tape drives makes sense... but I can't get over the idea that even renting a stack of hard disks would be cheaper and more effective at this scale.

PS: Make sure you encrypt all of the data going in to the temporary storage; those aren't your disks.

[jonathankoren]

You still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case. Personally, I don't even know where I put this second NAS, since it would need power and bandwidth, unless you really wanted to sneakernet a NAS, which would work, but seems really weird.

My home nas is small enough where I can reliably backup to some USB external drives and store in a drawer offsite. According to FreeNAS, that's a horrible solution because USB is too error prone and moving disks shortens their life, and blah blah blah, and so USB backup is explicitly a WILLNOTFIX, and a sign that the requestor is stupid, as opposed to knowing full well what the risks are, and is satisfied with them. The horrible FreeNAS community, and the lack of this feature was why I adopted OpenMediaVault. (I highly recommend OMV.)

I guess I could always upload TARs to Glacier. That might be a legitimate solution.

[cat199]

> You still have to put the second NAS somewhere, preferably offsite to avoid the house-burns-down fail case.

Think pretty much the only viable solution for this for home users is to have a 'peering agreement' with a trusted friend where you each colo the others machine at your home.. however this can be tricky because you're sticking all of your sensitive stuff in someone elses house and trading some level of full network acess to each other - though I suppose trading access to some kind of encrypted rsync-like dumps or similar might work without some of those risks being too high

[cvwright]

Why not use borg/attic to create an encrypted/HMAC'd backup on the USB drive?

[pmiller2]

Glacier is not a good primary backup. It's not designed for that. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365

[secabeen]

I have a good friend on the other side of the hill in town. We cross-backup our NAS systems to each other.

[hrez]

Without ZFS (as far as I can see) OpenMediaVault is failing at its main job i.e. keeping data safe. That's not the tradeoff I would make.