While reading many of the blogs and posts here about self hosting, I notice that self hosters spend a lot of time searching for and migrating between VPS or backup hosting. Being a cheapskate, I have a raspberry pi with a large disk attached and leave it at a relative’s house. I’ll rsync my backup drive to it nightly. The problem is when something happens, I have to walk them through a reboot or do troubleshooting over the phone or worse, wait until a holiday when we all meet.
What would a solution look like for a bunch of random tech nerds who happen to live near each other to cross host each other’s offsite backups? How would you secure it, support it or make it resilient to bad actors? Do you think it could work? What are the drawbacks?
Syncthing. Look no further, just check the “untrusted device” so that you don’t give unencrypted data to your friend’s disk.
I’ve done a backup swap with friends a couple times. Security wasn’t much of a worry since we connected to each other’s boxes over ssh or wireguard or similar and used tools that allowed encryption. The biggest challenge for us was that in my selfhosting friend group we all prefer different protocols so we had to figure out what each of us wanted to use to connect and access filesystems and set that up. The second challenge was ensuring uptime and that the remote access we set up for each other stayed up - and that’s what killed the project as we all eventually stopped maintaining the remote access and nobody seemed to care - so if I were to do it again I would make sure all participants have alerts monitoring their shared endpoint.
This reminds me that I need alerts monitoring set up. ; -)
A lot of technical aspects here, but IMHO the biggest drawback is liability. Do you offer free storage connected to internet to a group of “random tech nerds”. Do you trust all of them to use it properly? Are you really sure that none of them will store and distribute illegal stuff with it? Do you know them in person so you can forward the police to them in case they came knocking at your door?
Perhaps I’ve been naieve.
Comedy NNTP option here.
It’s an established, stable, understood and very very thoroughly debugged and tested protocol/server solution that’ll run on a potato and has clients for every OS you’ve ever heard of, and a bunch you haven’t.
Setting up your own little mini-network and sharing groups is fairly trivial and it’ll happily shove copies of everyone’s data to every server that’s on the feed.
Just encrypt your shit, post it, and let the software do the rest.
(I mean, if it’s good enough to move 200TB of perfectly legitimate Linux ISOs a day, it’ll handle however much data you could possibly be backing up.)
Disclaimer: it’s not quite that simple, but I mean, it’s pretty close to. Also I’m very much a UNIX boomer and am a big fan of the simplest solution that’s got the longest tested history over shiny new shit, so just making that bias clear.
