I’m fairly new to self-hosting and privacy. I used to be all about Apple. I scanned all my important documents and stored them in iCloud. That worked pretty well, but because I tend to make my life harder than necessary, I switched from an iPhone to a Pixel with GrapheneOS. It’s a hassle, but I’m happy with my decision overall. Unfortunately, my files are still in iCloud. As a Mac user, that’s not too bad, but not being able to access my files on the go is annoying.
I’m afraid to store all my important files in an LXC on my Proxmox server, even with daily backups.
Should I switch from iCloud to Nextcloud, Proton, or something similar? Or should I create an offsite backup—one encrypted in the cloud and one in my house? How are others handling this? Would an extra backup at a family member’s house be a good idea? Is paying for cloud storage common? I’d really appreciate any suggestions or ideas. Right now, I’m feeling overwhelmed by all the possibilities. Also, having 2 TB of iCloud storage made it too easy, since I didn’t carefully choose the files to upload. But paying 10 bucks a month feels a little stupid now that I don’t have the comfort factor any more.
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I recently did a big expansion on my home networking infrastructure, and backups were one of bigger triggers.
My setup is based on a local NAS + Hetzner storage box. The NAS runs Immich, Paperless, and the arr stack. Immich and Paperless back up to the storage box via borg, along with the configuration and docker files, but not the media. I either have physical copies of that or don’t really care because I can just download it again.
My computers also back up to the storage box via borg, except for the Photos, Music and Video directories, for the same reasons. My partners Mac is currently backing up to an external USB drive, but the plan is to move them to Backblaze for the easy SAF and/or the NAS as a Timemachine target.
I’m a linux user with a synology NAS, and I scan my documents to a shared folder, the process them with ocrmypdf and move them into an archival home.
The NAS is a 4 disk RAID6, data loss is almost impossible if you replace failing disks promptly. I have a regular backup to an external drive of all the important folders.
I use OpenVPN to connect to my network when I am away from home with Android and my Linux laptop.
I use Recoll to index my documents for full text search.
It’s very effective.
To help with the overwhelm, If you scanned these important documents then I’m presuming you still have the (paper?) originals?
Treat them as your source of truth and work with them first - some might have superceeded your backups anyway.
Then, as others have said, follow the 3-2-1 principle, but keep one of the backups as plain and simple files (.pdf I presume)
If you lock the files in an app, you’re making it even more difficult to restore them later.
Personally, I put my files (ie. .pdf, .jpg, etc) in encrypted online file storage (Hetzner) and I made sure I keep instructions elsewhere on how to get them back again (in case I’m… not able to)
Keep it simple
The point of scanning it all usually includes getting rid of the papers.
Recommend you follow the 321 backup strategy. Adopted to modern times I would say it is broadly:
- Have your data in more than 1 place
- Use more than one provider
- One of your types of backups should be physical media like an external hard drive.
From what you described if apple was to wipe your data[1] you would be completely out of luck… for example if something deletes data in your Mac and then that deletion gets synced… For the most part syncing data is not a backup.
Lastly, recommend you try to put all your critical data in one folder, or identify folders with critical data and prioritize backup of those first while you figure out the rest.
[1] Not only can a deletion “sync” from your mac, but there can be any number of issues… like a bad update to a file. There is also the possibility, no matter how small, that apple could wipe your data. Over time you always see news of “company X deleted entire set of data for user/company Y”.
I pay for a Hetzner Storage Box which serves as a Restic backup point for my password database and my Paperless documents.
I have a similar setup. My PC has disks formatted in Btrfs, so I get copy on write snapshots of my system disk, then have a local Restic backup on a secondary disk and then have an off-site Restic backup in the cloud on the Storage Box.
Thanks for pointing me to Paperless, never heard of it, it seems like it could be useful. I wonder how it deals with languages other than English, if at all.
This is good recommendation. 👍
I have Paperless on home server and I am backing up offsite to StorJ (encrypted). I have it on TrueNAS that have native support for StorJ so its as easy as setting credentials and and filling a few form fields. I back up all of my non-media data there and it costs me less than 5 bucks per month. I realize you have different setup, this is just an example what I do. You can still spin up Paperless in LXC and make sure you back up to some offsite storage. You mention Proton Drive, that is another option if you really just need storage. They have data redundancy so the chance you will loose your data is virtually zero. Make sure you have recovery email though, if you forget your password no one can help you if you don’t have recovery email.
My last mac computer bit the dust a few years ago so I was using my iphone, ipad, and icloud. For mt things then stuff happened and I stopped using iCloud and do not have the money to replace my other devices quite yet so I have a hand full of raspberry pi’s attached to HDD’s, NVMe drives, and SSD’s. I currently have pihole running on 2 of them, I have a pi zero 2 running wireguard so that I can access my dns hosts, but it is not strong enough to access my self hosted Nextcloud on the go, for that I am told I should use at least a pi 4. My pi’s do a lot more than host nextcloud, pihole, and wireguard though!
You should be able to use the web version of iCloud to access and download files if needed to your device.
Another option would be to use Tailscale to access a samba (or NFS) file share on your ProxMox server.
as long as you’re still a mac user the icloud space and sub isn’t really going to waste. can you do what you want to do on your android phone by just using a browser? i know you can’t do ‘everything’ that way, but basic file and email access should be accessible from pretty much any device’s browser.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity nginx Popular HTTP server
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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I have a NAS with a couple of SSDs configured in a ZFS mirror that backs up to a Raid Z2 storage pool on the same NAS. Again, on that NAS, I run Paperless-ngx in a docker container. Finally, I use the iOS app Swift Paperless to upload documents to Paperless-ngx. All done over Tailscale.
My load bearing NAS has a lot of redundancy but no offsite backups so I still keep some important documents in the cloud. I’m saving up for another NAS that I can keep at a family members house but prices are insane right now :/
If you can follow the 3-2-1 storage rule without using the cloud, that’s awesome. However, the upfront cost can be expensive depending on how much you are storing. Just do the best you can using whatever you have available to you, even if that means using iCloud as part of your setup.
The cloud could be your offsite backup. Using restic and running a regular paperless export is the way I do it. Nightly export, followed by a backup to Hetzner.
How does Hetzner work? I just looked at their storage box prices, and it seems too good to be true? €40/mo for 20TB. And they break it down to €0.0651/hr. Does that mean I could run the backups only when needed and pay less than €40/mo?
It is a monthly price you pay for the storage, traffic included. Breaking it down to hours would make sense if you keep the storage for a short time only. A backup you want to keep indefinitely of course.
The script to trigger my paperless export:
docker compose exec -T webserver document_exporter ../exportThis is run via a crontab entry every night, and exports to a mounted directory. Said directory then is included in my nightly restic backup, scheduled via resticprofile.
Cloudflare has free storage plans if you don’t need too much space… documents are typically small files.
I just copy things into one place and then copy to cloudflare. Perfect for documents, my gitea repos, config files, etc.
