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ramses0today at 2:02 PM1 replyview on HN

We need to talk about The Cone of Backups(tm), which you and I seem to have separately derived!

Props for getting this implemented and seemingly trusted... I wish there was an easier way to handle some of this stuff (eg: tiny secure key material => hot syncthing => "live" git files => warm docs and photos => cold bulk movies, isos, etc)... along with selective "on demand pass through browse/fetch/cache"

They all have different policy, size, cost, technical details, and overall SLA/quality tradeoffs.


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hedoratoday at 3:11 PM

Does syncthing work yet?

~ 5 years ago, I had a development flow that involved a large source tree (1-10K files, including build output) that was syncthing-ed over a residential network connection to some k8s stuff.

Desyncs/corruptions happened constantly, even though it was a one-way send.

I've never had similar issues with rsync or unison (well, I have in unison, but that's two-way sync, and it always prompted to ask for help by design).

Anyway, my decade-old synology is dying, so I'm setting up a replacement. For other reasons (mostly a decade of systemd / pulse audio finding novel ways to ruin my day, and not really understanding how to restore my synology backups), I've jumped ship over to FreeBSD. I've heard good things about using zfs to get:

saniod + syncoid -> zfs send -> zfs recv -> restic

In the absence of ZFS, I'd do:

rsync -> restic

Or:

unison <-> unison -> restic.

So, similar to what you've landed on, but with one size tier. I have docker containers that the phone talks to for stuff like calendars, and just have the source of the backup flow host my git repos.

One thing to do no matter what:

Write at least 100,000 files to the source then restore from backup (/ on a linux VM is great for this). Run rsync in dry run / checksum mode on the two trees. Confirm the metadata + contents match on both sides. I haven't gotten around to this yet with the flow I just proposed. Almost all consumer backup tools fail this test. Comments here suggest backblaze's consumer offering fails it badly. I'm using B2, but I haven't scrubbed my backup sets in a while. I get the impression it has much higher consistency / durability.

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