The Restic Off-Site Backup Workflow That Costs Almost Nothing and Encrypts Everything — A Vinyl Burns Workflow
Time Machine covers your local drive. It doesn’t cover the scenario where your house burns down, gets flooded, or someone walks out with both your Mac and the external drive next to it. Off-site backup is the part most people skip until they need it.
Restic + Backblaze B2 covers that gap, encrypts everything client-side (Backblaze never sees your unencrypted data), and costs roughly $0.006 per GB…
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Backups Aren’t One Thing — They’re a Strategy
If you’re running anything important on a VPS, “having backups” isn’t a checkbox—it’s a layered system of tradeoffs between speed, cost, and survivability.
Here’s what my current stack looks like:
DigitalOcean Backups — daily snapshots, retained for 4 weeks
JetBackup (local) — rolling 3 days of backups stored on the server
Backblaze B2 (remote…
New Code Projects: Backblaze B2 Version Cleaner & VBA SharePoint List Library
It’s been a while since I’ve posted code of any description, but I’ve been working on a couple of things recently that I’m going to make publicly available on my GitLab page (and my mirror repository at code.jnf.me)
Backblaze B2 Version Cleaner
I wrote last week about transitioning my cloud backup to Backblaze’s B2 service, and I also mentioned a feature of it that’s nice but also slightly problematic to me: it keeps an unlimited version history of all files.
That’s good, because it gives me the ability to go back in time should I ever need to, but over time the size of this version history will add up - and I’m paying for that storage.
So, I’ve written a script that will remove old versions once a newer version of the same file has reached a certain (configurable) “safe age.”
For my purposes I use 30 days, so a month after I’ve overwritten or deleted a file the old version is discarded. If I haven’t seen fit to roll back the clock before then my chance is gone.
Get the code here!
VBA SharePoint List Library
This one I created for work. Getting data from a SharePoint list into Excel is easy, but I needed to write Excel data to a list. I assumed there’d be a VBA function that did this for me, but as it turns out I was mistaken - so I wrote one!
At the time of writing this is in “proof of concept” stage. It works, but it’s too limited for primetime (it can only create new list items, not update existing ones, and each new item can only have a single field).
Out of necessity I’ll be developing this one pretty quickly though, so check back regularly! Once it’s more complete I’ll be opening it up to community contributions.
I have no plans to add functions that read from SharePoint to this library, but once I have the basic framework down that wouldn’t be too hard to add if you’re so inclined. Just make sure you contribute back!
I’ve written a couple of times before about what I do to backup all my important data.
My last post on the topic was more than a year ago though, so I’ll forgive you if you’ve forgotten. Here’s a recap: originally I was using a fairly traditional consumer backup service, ADrive. This worked well because they’re one of the few services that provides access by Rsync, which made it easy to run scripted backup jobs on my linux server. Their account structure didn’t really meet my needs, however: you pay for the storage you have available to you, not what you use. When I hit the upper limit of my account the next tier up didn’t make financial sense, so I switched.
About 15 months ago I moved my backups over to Google’s Cloud Platform. This gives me an unlimited amount of storage space, and I just pay for what I use at a rate of $0.02/GB/Month. This has been working well for me.
In December I found Backblaze B2. They offer a service very similar to Google’s (or Amazon S3, or Microsoft Azure, or any of the other players in this space that you may have heard of), except they cost a quarter of the price at $0.005/GB/Month. There’s even a free tier, so you don’t pay anything for the first 10GB. When I first looked at them their toolset for interacting with their storage buckets really wasn’t where I needed it to be to make them viable, but they’ve been iterating quickly. I checked again this week, and I’ve already started moving some of my backups over.
In time, I plan to switch all my backups over. So far I’ve moved my documents folder and backups of my webserver, which totals about 2.5GB. That’s nice, because it means I’m still within the free tier. The next thing to tackle is the backups of all our photos and music, which combine at around 110GB. That means I have to transfer 110GB of data though, which is going to be a painful experience. I’m still thinking about the best way to do it, but probably the direction I’ll go is to spin up a VPS and have it handle the download of the backup from Google and the upload to Backblaze, then it doesn’t hog all the bandwidth I have on my home internet connection.
The only other thing to think about with Backblaze is versioning. Google offers versioning on their storage buckets, but I have it disabled. With Backblaze there is no option (at least not that I’ve found) to disable this feature – meaning previous versions of files are retained and count toward my storage bill.
I’m torn on this. The easy thing to do would be to disable it, assuming one of Backblaze’s future iterations of their service offering is in fact the ability to turn this off. I’m thinking though that the smarter thing to do is make use of it.
For me and my consumer needs, that will most likely mean I put together a PHP script or two to more intelligently manage it, however. Some past versions are nice, but some of the files in my backup are changed pretty frequently, and I definitely don’t need an unlimited history.
Still, I’m very much pleased with the price of B2, and watching the feature set rapidly improve over the past couple of months gives me confidence that I can move my backups over and keep them there for the long-term, because the transition from one service to another is not something I want to put myself through too often.
