Selfhosted

you can rent a vps and set up encrypted backups

Syncthing to a pi at my parents place.

External drives that I keep in my office at work. Also cloud storage.

I use rsync.net

It's not the lowest price, but I like the flexibility of access.

For instance, I was able to run rclone on their servers to do a direct copy from OneDrive to rsync.net, 400Gb without having to go through my connection.

I can mount backups with sshfs if I want to, including the daily zfs snapshots.

I use LUKS and backup to a usb-drive that I have at home. I rsync those backups to my work once a week. Not everyone can backup to their office, but as others have said, backing up to a friend/family member's house is doable. The nice thing about rsync is that you can limit the bandwidth, so that even though it takes longer, it doesn't saturate their internet connection.

Most of my work is with Macs, and even one server is running macOS, so for those who don't know how it works 'over there', one runs Time Machine which is a versioning system keeping hourlies for a day, dailies for a week, then just weeklies after that. It accommodates using multiple disks, so I have a networked drive that services all the mac computers, and each computer also has a USB drive it connects to. Each drive usually services a couple of computers.

Backups happen automatically without interruption or drama.

I just rotate the USB drives out of the building into a storage unit once a month or so and bring the offsite drives back in to circulation. The timemachine system nags you for missing backup drives if it's been too long, which is great.

It’s not perfect but very reliable and I wish everyone had access to a similar system, it's very easy, apple got this one thing right.

Next to paying for cloud storage, I know people who store an external hdd at their parent's or with friends. I don't do the whole backup thing for all the recorded TV shows and ripped bluerays... If my house burns down, they're gone. But that makes the amount of data a bit more manageable. And I can replace those. I currently don't have a good strategy. My data is somewhat scattered between my laptop, the NAS, an external hdd which is in a different room but not off-site, one cheap virtual server I pay for and critical things like the password manager are synced to the phone as well. Main thing I'm worried about is one of the mobile devices getting stolen so I focus on having that backed up to the NAS or synced to Nextcloud. But I should work on a solid strategy in case something happens to the NAS.

I don't think the software is a big issue. We got several good backup tools which can do incremental or full backups, schedules, encryption and whatever someone might need for backups.

RClone to a cloud storage (hetzner in my case). Rclone is easy to configure and offers full encryption, even for the file names.

As the data is only uploaded once, a daily backup uploads only the added or changed files.

Just as a side note: make sure you can retrieve your data even in case your main system fails. Make sure you have all the passwords/crypto keys available.

For storing the backups, I use a storage VPS. I got one from HostHatch a few years ago during Black Friday sales, with 10TB space for $10/month. Hetzner have good deals with their storage boxes, too - they offer 5TB space for $13/month if you're in the USA (you need to add VAT if you're in Europe).

A good rule of thumb is to never pay more than $5/TB/month, and during Black Friday it's closer to $2/TB/month. The LowEndTalk forum has the best Black Friday deals.

I use Borgbackup for backups, and Borgmatic to handle scheduling them. Borgbackup is a fantastic piece of software.

Borgmatic has an "append only" mode which lets you configure particular SSH keys to only be able to add data to the backup, not delete it. Even if someone/something (ransomware, malicious users, etc) gains access to your system and tries to delete the backups, they can't. Essentially, this is protection against ransomware.

This is a very common issue with other backup solutions - the client has full access to the backup, so malware on the client system could potentially delete all the backups.

I have two backup copies of most things. One copy on my home server and one copy on my storage VPS. If you do do multiple backups, Borgbackup recommend doing two separate backups rather than doing one then rsyncing it to another server.

I use Proxmox PBS for all my backups. Datastore is on my file server at home. I sync the datastore daily to a little NAS at a family members house and to a super cheap storage VPS on the other side of the country. I also do a manual sync to an external drive that keep offline at home.

Any super important documents such as tax records, health related files, backup of the data volume from vaultwarden, or anything related to wills & estates get backed up as well to 2 USB thumb drives that are LUKS encrypted. I keep 1 in my go bag and another is hidden somewhere.... Thumb drives get updated once a month, or sooner if anything major changes.

I have a rpi4 awith an external hdd at my parents house, which I connect via a wireguard vpn, mount and decrypt the external hdd and then it triggers a restic backup to a restic-rest server as append only.

The whole thing is done via a python script

I chose the rest-server because it allows "append only", so the data can't be deleted easily from my side of the vpn.

A huge tape archive in a mountain. It's pretty standard for geophysical data. I have some (encrypted) personal stuff on a few tapes there.

As others have said, use tools like borg and restic.

Shop around for cloud storage with good pricing for your use-case. Many charge for different usage patterns, like restoring data or uploading.

Check out storj.io, I like their pricing - they charge for downloading/restore (IIRC), and I figure that's a cost I can live with if I need to restore.

Otherwise I keep 3 local copies of data:

1 is live, and backed up to storj.io

2 is mirrored from 1 every other week

3 is mirrored from 1 every other week, opposite 2

This works for my use-case, where I'm concerned about local failures and mistakes (and don't trust my local stores enough to use a backup tool), but my data doesn't change a lot in a week. If I were to lose 1 week of changes, it would be a minor issue. And I'm trusting my cloud backup to be good (I do test it quarterly, and do a single file restore test monthly).

This isn't an ideal (or even recommended approach), just works with the storages I currently have, and my level of trust of them.

My ratchet way of doing it is Backblaze. There is a docker container that lets you run the unlimited personal plan on Linux by emulating a windows environment. They let you set an encryption key so that they can’t access your data.

I’m sure there are a lot more professional and secure ways to do it, but my way is cheap, easy, and works.

I rsync a copy of it to a friends house every night. It's straight forward, simple and free.

I use borg backup. It, and another tool called restic, are meant for creating encrypted backups. Further, it can create backups regularly and only backup differences. This means you could take a daily backup without making new copies of your entire library. They also allow you to, as part of compressing and encrypting, make a backup to a remote machine over ssh. I think you should start with either of those.

One provider thats built for being a cloud backup is borgbase. It can be a location you backup a borg (or restic I think) repository. There are others that are made to be easily accessed with these backup tools.

Lastly, I'll mention that borg handles making a backup, but doesn't handle the scheduling. Borgmatic is another tool that, given a yml configuration file, will perform the borgbackup commands on a schedule with the defined arguments. You could also use something like systemd/cron to run a schedule.

Personally, I use borgbackup configured in NixOS (which makes the systemd units for making daily backups) and I back up to a different computer in my house and to borgbase. I have 3 copies, 1 cloud and 2 in my home.