Regardless of your of your offsite backup target, you want to encrypt your backup since you can’t physical prevent any unauthorized third party from reading your data. Using a service via the internet allows you to automate the complete backup process. Thus it requires alot of discipline to get a regular backup. An external harddrive costs no recuring fee, but the creation of a backup involves alot of repetitive manual labor. As an offsite backup target you can either use a service like Backblaze, Amazon S3 Glacier or via you internet connection or you can store a (USB) harddrive at a friends house or at work. Common causes of a total loss of your home is a fire, earth quake or if your local computing hardware is in the basement, a flood. The offsite backup protects your data from a total loss of your home. In contrast the offsite backup is often connected with way lower speeds to your home. The restore time is low since we can achieve a couple hundert MBit/s up to GBit/s over local network or USB connections. The frequency of backups are between every couple of minutes up to every day. This allows for a high frequency of backups. Since your backup target device is local to the source of the data, the network or USB speeds are quite high. The local backup target may be an external USB harddrive or a NAS. The onsite backup protects your data from hardware failures, software bugs, encrypting trojans or human errors. The two kinds of backups are used to protect your data from different threads and enable restores on different time scales. Synchronisation without version history is not a backup.Use different backup tools for your onsite and offsite backups.Be able to restore your offsite backup without any of your personal computing devices.Have two backups, an onsite and an offsite backup.I will start with the goals itself and will outline my reasoning later and describe my implementation of this design. In this blogpost I want to show you the design goals I use to design my backup strategy. Without a backup you are either doomed to redo a lot of work or the precious pictures of the last years are lost forever. And even if your computers don’t lose your data, a human error can erase a lot of data quickly.

Hardware failures, software bugs and encrypting trojans threaten your data. Compute devices may fail and lose your data.

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