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I lost my house to a forest fire when I was a kid and the help we got was literally life saving. This time around I'm already stockpiling dry food and water. Also been getting a bunch of work done on my car so it's as reliable as possible just in case I need to leave in a hurry. Got my "oh shit" bag ready to go in my car too with some extra water and food in the trunk. I live in an area that's prone to forest fires and flash floods so I'm not really taking any chances for when shit hits the fan. Usually I'd call this overkill but I don't think that applies this time around knowing that no one is coming to help.
I suggest setting up a small NAS on the way to the garage and backing stuff up on it regularly, that way when you need to go, just unplug it and put it in your car, and you have a backup of your data should the shit hit the fan.
I very much like the sentiment, but I’d mostly advocate for a data backup that doesn’t require any particular effort or memory to preserve in an emergency.
Obviously everyone’s personal situation varies, but as a simple default I usually recommend that friends and family simply use whichever cloud drive service is available from the device manufacturer that stores their photos (ie, google Drive, Microsoft one drive, or Apple iCloud). Photos are almost always the most irreplaceable digital asset, storage is typically just a few bucks a month, and using the “default” provider usually requires zero skill, effort, or recurring action. Other than making sure you can afford the auto-debit each month, your backs are mostly foolproof.
Cons include a dependency on a cloud service, which has a recurring charge and a privacy impact. The charge is typically minor vs the cost of a NAS or similar, and most services have some privacy assurances that may be enough to ease your concern. Nobody will ever care as much about your backups as you, but in aggregate a team of skilled full time FAANG engineers is often a more robust administrator than a solo customer.
If you have the desire and resources, you could and should do both backups, or as many as you reasonably can manage in as many places as possible.
With how places like the USA are degrading right now, the privacy impact is increasingly huge. Having a photo in your archive that could be flagged by an ML filter automatically as doing something now deemed "illegal" like having the wrong skin color is bad.
As for cost, you'd be surprised in that a few years of cloud or less can easily cost as much as a small NAS that can last a decade.
I'd advocate people learn how to preserve their data themselves, it is a good skill to have, and it helps strengthen data education in a time when Tech Bro companies want people as dumb and reliant on their tech as possible.
Easy enough to follow guides or ask an AI to set up a sync with another similar box at someone else's house in a different city or state to have an offsite copy.
Yeah, the most useful backup is the one you’ll actually use. And people will actually use the first-party services, because they just work. There’s no real effort required on the individual’s side, it just happens automatically.
There’s a large self-hosting community on Lemmy, because it sort of goes hand in hand with the whole “anyone can spin up an instance and host Lemmy themselves” thing. But the reality is that self hosting takes work, and a whole fucking lot of learning if you’re not already familiar with how to do it. And it’s easy to fuck it up in ways that can leave you vulnerable to attacks. Many users wouldn’t even know how to register a domain, let alone how to point their hosted services to it.
If you want to self-host your backups, that’s great. I host mine. But I’m not going to advocate for casual users to start doing it, especially when it’s sensitive data like photos. You store that shit on the cloud because that’s the easiest way to accomplish the 3-2-1 backup method; 3 backups, 2 different types of storage media, 1 off site.
The cloud storage can absolutely be your offsite backup. Especially when dealing with something as wide-reaching as a wildfire. If your house burns down due to a wildfire, do you really think your buddy’s house two streets away will be a safe location for your offsite backup? Fuck no, because your buddy’s house is on fire too.
Set one up at a family or friends place. Encrypted and nightly backups. It's off-site and no need to remember.
The issue I have with this is that you need to forward a port on the NAS, exposing it directly to the internet, not only in your own network, but at your friend's or parent's network, and unless they are interested enough in keeping the NAS patched and secure, you are not only responsible for the security of your own network, but of your friend's or parent's network as well.
I am an IT guy at work, I don't want to be one at home also.
They mentioned wildfires. If your house burns down in a wildfire, your buddy’s house three streets away is also going to be on fire.
True, but most people have family in different states or counties. Even close friends would be fine with a setup like this. Do a swap, you give them your backup nas and they do the same. If they don't know how to do this, show them how.
Not if they are in another city or state, though. Easy to cover that contingency.
One approach is to use the NAS for all your daily self hosting needs and only use cloud services to store backup images of the NAS.
Very fair points, I just dislike the cloud so a local solution came to mind first