HACKER Q&A
📣 jacobwilliamroy

What is the current state of the art in BIG (>5TB) cloud backups?


I'm talking about greater than 5 TB in size. Rclone looks really good because I can just give it a bandwidth limit, point it at google drive and fire and forget. But I'm curious if that is the best way to do this? What does HN think?


  👤 monerozcash Accepted Answer ✓
This needs more information. 5TB is far from "BIG" when it comes to cloud backups.

You can probably get away with google drive+rclone+borg/restic/whatever, but it will be rather clunky. Backblaze might be a nicer backend to use.

I use rsync.net with borg, but not sure about your budget. Their 1TB lifetime plan is very competitive though.


👤 slipheen
Like so many things, it depends-

How quickly do you need to be able to restore? Is it commercial or homelab?

The most cost-effective option by far would be to put a NAS device someplace offsite. You could use tailscale to connect to it remotely.

After that, depending on your access patterns, either a glacier-style s3 service (aws or backblaze/etc), or a rented bare-metal server with big disks some place inexpensive.


👤 brudgers
Why are you choosing to use the cloud instead of spinning rust under your control?

Or to put it another way, why is state of the art important?


👤 Sohcahtoa82
5 TB? I don't know how to count that low.

👤 bomewish
If it’s important just use b2 or hetzner storage box. Use restic or rustic for backup and dedupe and encryption. I run this setup for home and work and we’re doing this on 10tb+.

👤 aynyc
I was actually talking to my dad the other day. He asked me if there is a way for him to replicate his hard drive to me without touching cloud providers. The contents are family photos & videos, plus paperwork. I couldn't find a simple solution.

👤 throwaway81523
I'm using Borg and Hetzner Storage Box. 5TB is nothing much. Big used to mean petabytes, but maybe petabytes aren't big any more either.

👤 JustExAWS
Rclone with aws s3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class is about $1 a month per TB.

I didn’t use rclone. I just used native AWS cli commands. But I’m an AWS guy and already had my own seldom used AWS account.