I have accounts on iCloud, Dropbox, and (soon) GoogleDrive which are each/all useful for sharing files between my various Apple systems (Macs, iPad, iPhone). I also have a Synology NAS box for those things that I want archived but not directly shared nor using disk space on my devices. However I need to back those files up to a offsite location. Are there any such places? I do not need/want to have the backed-up copies accessible except in the extreme case that the NAS drive goes down.
Backblaze B2 or something similar?
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I use B2 to back up stuff I really value. I’m not going to pay to store a copy of my Plex library there, but all my DSLR photos and old family photo scans are there. I have the cloud sync service running on my NAS to capture other valued files stored there (I have a file share explicitly for this purpose).
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For the past 13 years I’ve been using Arq Backup, first with Amazon S3 and for the past several years with Backblaze B2.
It can be used with several cloud storage solutions, but the least expensive may be S3 Glacier Deep Archive
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Just curious, why the multiple cloud systems? Am I wrongly assuming that the only use is for sharing between your own systems?
(Many of us are forced to keep multiple cloud accounts because of external requirements (work, clients, collaborators), but strive to narrow it down to one system, if we could.)
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Good question. Dropbox because that is the simplest way to sync projects between Mac, iPad, and iPhone. iCloud because it integrates Mac programs with their iOS/iPad counterpart apps, lets me copy-and-paste between my devices plus family sharing. And GoogleDrive because well … some associates are wedded to Windows; it seems to be the way they want to share things.
That’s the suite I have …
Amazon Glacier is one But I backup my Synology on external hard drives that get rotated so there is a nightly one, 2 monthly’s that swap and one that is every few months in another city.
For me the whole point of the NAS is mass storage. It’s utterly impractical to back up my NAS to anything local except another (expensive) NAS, which is then impractical to get offsite.
Either I have to get very selective or cloud is my only option.
Cloud offsite … fine for me. Cloud sync services … not for me as they just could (and would) “sync” the flaw.
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We’ll have to agree to disagree. I believe it to be far harder to get mass data into a cloud system vs a local hard drive. With 28TB external drives costing less than $400 it’s pretty easy to make a rolling backup set of your NAS as well.
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But as the original poster I’m looking for truly external solutions. Not just a set/sequence of removable drive(s) but off site storage.
I put sets of disk at a location in another town and county so offsite it is.
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+1, I put set of disks in a bank vault
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@SpivR @OogieM
I assume some of the data on these drives that are not in your possession might contain sensitive data. How are the drives encrypted?
I’ve had a rotating set in a bank vault for over a decade, however our bank (now JPMorgan Chase) is shutting down all their safe deposit boxes. Most banks don’t seem to offer them any more. Not sure what to do.
We’re fortunate our credit union still has its safety deposit vault. They recently opened a new branch and included a small vault space for that as well. I don’t know how widespread is that trend, but it could be worth looking around.
We also used to use an offsite fire safe in an office building for drives.
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Enjoy it while you can. Safety deposit boxes are becoming as scarce as payphones.
Since the off site fire rated media safe is in a trusted family member’s house where only my immediate family, our trustee and our estate lawyer have the codes to get in I have not encrypted it beyond the basic encryption provided by Carbon Copy Cloner.
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I had a safety deposit box at a main branch of a top 10 US bank for over 20 years, Then a few years ago I got a letter telling me to remove everything. They closed their main branch and only one of the six remaining locations in town still offered boxes, but had none available.
I backup locally and to Backblaze using Arq. And store some encrypted disk images (.dmg) on Google Drive. But I also keep an unencrypted copy of everything hidden on site because I have lost data in the past when an encrypted backup became corrupted.