Define “properly”…

I see lots of solutions here, but some explanation of the basics are missing for someone starting out… this is not meant to sound preachy…

RAID is not a backup. It’s just better hardware fault tolerance. Delete does the same thing on RAID as it does one 1 drive.

Everyone syncs / copies / duplicates files somewhere, but you need a way of finding the previous backup in case something was deleted. This can be done with various ways / tech, but the point is - have some history not just 1 copy. Many pointers to 3-2-1 in here, but that also doesn’t mean 3 copies of just today’s data…

Backups are nothing without Restores. Test the backups. Various ways, but do it. Often.

And consider what you’re backing up and why… ie just your data? (Ie photos), or all the config files, databases, operating systems, etc to do a full restore on new metal. If the latter, I recommend keeping your data separate from the OS / config files, etc.

Source: decades of tech disasters 😁

Sooo… where’s the self-hosted material coming from if Bluray’s aren’t being produced any more?

If the high seas dries up, are we up shit creek and have to stream?

Oooh, names? (Of ISPs)

Microsoft Windows surely?

/s

Interesting.

I have an old free email provider that’s just passed the email service to another provider

I’m looking to move because I used to be able to use <anything-at-all>@my-email.domain and I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that anymore

I basically do what you’re doing - using email prefixes for the site I’m registering with… I even caught a company out once when I suddenly started getting spam from that email address. They’d sold my details…

Just to address the resourcing point…

VM resources can be over allocated, meaning that the hypervisor will try it’s best to meet their requirements, so you’re not wasting anything and could run more VMs than you have resources for.

Yes, VMs can also be configured to need a certain amount of resources and the hypervisor will have to stop, but I just wanted you to know it’s not fixed.

Performance is going to be the same.

Security is the main point here.

If this is your internet facing firewall then you want minimal layers of software complexity, so bare metal is the answer.

I’m a pfSense user, so I don’t know how regularly OPNsense is updated, but, it’s so much easier to just reboot that 1 box whilst everything else is mostly unaffected.

Better still, do a full device backup before an update and then you have a simple disaster recovery backup in case of any problems.

My journey:

Random stuff --> OwnCloud --> Nextcloud --> syncthing + Radicale

I gave up with the constant changes during upgrades and increasing dependencies for features that we weren’t using.

Now my system’s lean, light, responsive and just works (on a Pi3)

Prosody’s next…

Every way?

Well, apart from simplicity and security I suppose… and networking…

Oh, and storage…

But, before you think I’m arguing with you, I’m not… Containers have their place, VMs also, they are just for different uses.

In this case, I have a NAS, with Immich installed directly on it and I don’t have to mess with any abstraction layers… and it all plays nice with the other applications.

Maybe yours is different… but mine is better on bare metal.

Gotta chime in with a +1 for bare metal too…

How so?

I think this summarises all the other answers here

Backups… with LVM, if you’re trying to do a full system backup (ie with clonezilla, etc) then you have to backup the whole thing - you can’t backup just 1 drive.

I have a media server with 2x 2TB HDDs and 1x SSD in a LVM, split into Music, Video, TV… and the OS … and I can backup the individual files of course, but I can’t backup just the OS drive.

btrfs didn’t exist when I created it, but I use it on my NAS and it’s great.

I’ll be rebuilding my media server one day and change LVM to btrfs.

Hmm, ok, I’d not thought of the remote troubleshooting part.

The NAS is at a family member’s home, so the troubleshooting might come up in the future.

Thanks

Yeah, my default go to is a site-to-site OpenVPN tunnel, but thought I’d look around at what the kool kidz are doing these days. Thanks.

Yeah, those are for the layer on top of a secure network.

My use case is less about the backup software, more about the network.

Diode - as far as I can make out from their site - provides both storage and networking, but I’m not interested in their storage (as I don’t understand where it is) - this is about getting data to my offsite NAS, securely.

Agreed - Diode caught my eye as an alternative to a site-to-site VPN as I have 2x NAS at different locations (+ Backblaze, which I’ll be moving away from)

So, it’s less about the destination, more about the network…

But it feels like the website’s got more time invested in it, than the actual tech solution.

Yeah, that was kinda my thoughts too.

Hmm, didn’t know about this… I was just using dd to see if the size was about right.

Thanks