[polairscience]

A lot of people are talking about their backup storage solutions in here, but it's mostly about corporate cloud providers. I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.

Which is to say, hardware is cheap, software is open, and privacy is very hard to come by. Thus I've been thinking I'd like to not use cloud providers and just keep a duplicate system at a friends, and then of course return the favor. This adds a lot of privacy and quite a bit of redundancy. With the rise of wireguard (and tailscale I suppose), keeping things connected and private has never been easier.

I know that leaning on social relationships is never a hot trend in tech circles but is anyone else considering doing this? Anyone done it? I've never seen it talked about around here.

[nsbk]

My off-prem backups are in a Tailscale connected NAS at my parent's house. I'm in the process of talking a friend into having Tailscale configured to host more off-prem backups at his place as well. I'm moving out of iCloud for photo library management and into Immich. I really don't want to lose my photos and videos hence the off-prem backups. Tailscale has been a blessing for this kind of use case

[polairscience]

Oooo. That's the other thing I need to figure out, because it's 90% for my photography. How have you liked immich? Have you tried any other options?

[Root_Denied]

I'm in the process of moving all my backups to Immich - honestly it's best in class software.

I'm able to set it up so that my SO and I can view all the pictures taken by the other (mostly cute photos of our dog and kid, but makes it easier to share them with others when we don't have to worry about what device they're on), have it set to auto-backup, and routed through my VPS so it's available effectively worldwide.

The only issue that I run into is a recent one, which is hard drive space - I've got it on a NAS/RAID setup with backups sent to another NAS at my parents' place, but it's an expensive drive replacement in current market conditions.

[michelsedgh]

I recommend Ente photos, harder to setup but feels much more robust and its end to end encrypted, which I prefer.

[neop1x]

I can also recommend Ente. It is pretty polished. Go-based backend using Postgres DB, Flutter-based android version, React-based web frontend (electron for desktop).

[nine_k]

> hardware is cheap

Hardware was cheap a year ago. Whoever managed to build their boxes full of cheap RAM and HDDs, great, they did the right thing. It will be some time until such an opportunity presents itself again.

[Evan-Purkhiser]

I do something like this! I’m based in NY but my dad’s in LA. I put together an rpi5 + 5xSATA hat with 3 10TB WD red drives using zraid1 (managed to pick these up over the holidays before prices started going up, $160 per drive!). 3D printed the case and got it running a diskless alpine image with tailscale and zrepl for ZFS snapshot replication. Just left it running in a corner at his place and told him not to touch it heh

Whole thing cost around $500. Before that I was paying ~$35 a month for a Google workspace with 5TB of drive space. At one point in the past it was “unlimited” space for $15 a month. Figure the whole thing will pay for itself in the next couple of years.

Actually just finished the initial replication of my 10TB pool. I ran into a gnarly situation where zrepl blew away the initial snapshot on the source pool just after it finished syncing, and I ended up having to patch in a new fake “matching” snapshot. I had claude write up a post here, if you’ll excuse the completely AI generated “blog post”, it came up with a pretty good solution https://gist.github.com/evanpurkhiser/7663b7cabf82e6483d2d29...

[Jedd]

Yes, absolutely. I move between two sites, and also run some gear at my sibling's home, so I have the 3 separate sites thing sorted. ECC + RAID1 + borg at each site gives archival capability on top of standard backup.

Syncthing has the 'untrusted peer' feature, which I've only used once, accidentally, but I believe provides an elegant way of providing some disk for a friend while maintaining privacy of the content.

[bluedino]

> I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.

Have been doing this for 25 years.

If you have asymmetrical connections it's easiest to do the initial backup locally and then take your drive(s) to your friends house and then just sync/update.

[mtsolitary]

I get 3-2-1 backups with no "big cloud" dependency using - My Mac - My NAS (RAID1) using Syncthing - Incremental borg backups to rsync.net (geo-redundant plan) with a cron job.