General Backup Strategy
This is a brief summary for how I envision backups will work with my home infrastructure. My primary goal with my backup strategy is to minimize the fallout from a natural disaster or burglary, and ensure that I won't be totally screwed if my house burns down or I'm mugged. While neither of these scenarios are super common, living in a large city with a large population of people makes the improbable inevitable...
My backup strategy consists of the following for my computer:
- Generating one encrypted, compressed full ZFS snapshot and sending it to AWS once a year and tiering it to Deep Glacier after 2 days (AWS-Backup.
- Sending encrypted, compressed incremental ZFS snapshots to AWS once every month (AWS-Backup.
- Retaining 2 years worth of encrypted, compressed snapshots in AWS (AWS-Backup.
- Making full backups of my disk to blu ray once every 2-4 years and storing these backups offsite (Blu-Ray-Backup.
- Scanning paper documents using my document scanner and saving them to /datastore/documents on Maxwell (which also holds regular Excel/Word/CSV documents).
- Syncing /datastore/documents (essential documents from the apartment / my life in general) up to Google Drive (it was necessary to purchase 100GB on Google One for this, although the documents themselves are quite small).
For my smartphone:
- Syncing all photos to Google Drive, where they are then copied down to Maxwell using rclone or similar at some regular interval. I may delete these manually sporadically, just to ensure that they're on hand (basically just treating Drive how I treat my current phone's storage)
- Syncing all my audio diaries to Google Drive, where they are similarly sync'd down to Maxwell, but then deleted afterwards from Drive (no reason for them to linger there).
- Syncing all my texts to GMail using IMAP with SMS Backup+ (IMAP is necessary because Google broke its API)
For my online data: