The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/pleiad_m45 on 2025-07-02 13:19:39.
Hi fellow DataHoarders.
maybe I'm just in a bad mood but seeing some videos about geopolitics and the increasing possibility of SOME kind of conflict, .. I began thinking about a solution to backup & store all my data at a different geolocation (I'm in Europe) so in case I need to move to another country, flee of a 'smaller' war .. whatever.. I have all my precious family photos and videos and music etc. at a location where it's (most probably in that very moment and afterwards for a while) SAFE.
A lot of considerations popped up in my mind, some of them I tried to answer by myself.
Feel free to add some options I might forgot but are useful to consider.
- shall it be instantly accessible or can I wait couple of minutes / hours for the files to be ready and downloadable ?
- Waiting is ok but I really need 'pool as files' to be stored in the cloud then, so zfs send into huuuge file(s) will be the first step..
- what kind of remote storage is ideal ? Cloud, e.g. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive kind of stuff (with still A LOT of extra egress costs when I need to download my data) or dedicated hosting with a low-spec'd server with 4 identical HDD-s like mine here at home or what else ?
a. - cloud not sure due to high egress costs when I need to get everything back
b. - distributed storage maybe across several providers ? (Gluster is dead although it seemed a great project some years ago)
c. - buying co-location/dedicated servers with empty HDD-s and create everything for myself there ?
(e.g. shinjiru or similar) Then zfs-send the whole pool via a wireguard-established VPN maybe. But tbh I can't find a place where I could tell the hosting company "please buy me a consumer grade low-fi server and stuff it with 4x SATA Exos drives".. there are only packages predefined :/ 3. Pool as files. Most options accept files so my existing pools need to be exported into files maybe.
- Can zfs send's output be automatically split into several pieces with some kind of logical file numbering or do I need to use some kind of piping with mbuffer or similar ?
- Encryption
- Do I need encryption ? Yes, for sure.. data would be LUKS- or Veracrypt-encrypted either at the receiving side or even here at home prepared, before copying.
There's the low-fi solution (creating backup pool onto 4 HDD-s, ZFS snapshot/send into it, place it at a friend far away and sleep well) or the mid-fi (colocation / dedicated server) or even the hi-fi solution (bunch of unlimited-egress VPS instances at different providers and locations, each with their own ZFS mirrors, with a distributed filesystem on top of that or something similarly crazy overengineered solution).
Any other ideas ? :)
Cost is a factor of course, I'm just a random mortal IT guy, the cheaper the better as long as I can retrieve my pool(s) within 1 day or even instantly.
Amount of data would be let's say 38TB.