Clojurians Log v2

@stephen676 hey, thanks for the reply. would you mind following up in this thread?

Sorry about the misfired reply! I use restic. I wrote a little babashka script to coordinate doing backups to a usb drive as well as to backblaze and a thumb drive that I keep in a fire safe

For macOS, you might also like https://kopia.io/ which is similar to restic in functionality but comes with a GUI.

Lately I have been using backups on an external hard disk. Still need to set up something online I guess

I just use backblaze. I'd prefer to use something that was compatible with Time Machine, but backblaze is very cheap and easy to set up, and they have a good security track record afaik

@max.r.rothman as a "bucket" or do you use their software?

I use their software. The subscription fee is way less than I would pay for any storage service metered by storage use. I think they bank on most people having very little actual data to back up, but if you're above average bc you have a lot of media on your computers or whatever, it's a really good deal.

gotcha

If you don't have a lot of storage, my impression is that their B2 service is also very cheap compared to s3 et al, even if you use infrequent access/single region/etc. Most of these services offer high availability and throughout, which you pay for whether you use them or not, which is really not what you need for backups. And at the other end of the spectrum, aws glacier is optimized for low storage cost but if you ever need to restore, the access costs will kill you. Basically my 2c is that using public cloud storage for backups (with the possible exception of B2) is throwing money away on capabilities that aren't needed for your problem.

I have been searching for a satisfactory solution to this as well. The issues I have in my mind are that if the backups are done in a place-oriented manner, a corrupt backup is enough to ruin everything, and if immutable you'd instead be paying a significant amount for storage, at least if you never delete backups. If you delete backups that are older than a certain period of time, I suspect you'd need to put significant manual effort into ensuring there would be at least one working backup remaining.

I've been thinking of setting up two separate physical NAS locations + AWS Glacier. Physical NAS locations protect against Amazon going rogue and a single house fire, and Amazon hopefully protects against WW3 if the physical devices have to be left behind or if both locations burn down simultaneously. Let's hope Amazon doesn't go rogue simultaneously as WW3 breaks out! But effortless synchronization is the problem I am yet to solve.

Re. Backblaze backup software: https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2026/04/17/backblaze-stops-backing-up-dropbox-and-others-calls-it-an-improvement/

That's true, backblaze isn't a whole system backup. It skips system files and synced network drives like iCloud, gdrive, etc.

I use rclone to backup to backblaze, with all data encrypted

I also follow the 3 2 1 backup rule

I run multiple zpools across various machines that I backup to, with backblaze and a external NAS being a target in my backups too

I take backups quite seriously, I also test restores quite often 🙂

.

I just tested rclone to Dropbox via Kopia (I have a Dropbox account anyway and not nearly using all the space, made an App with restricted access). It was very slow. So Dropbox is out of the game 1MB/s. I tested a Exoscale bucket now, which was much better 33Mb/s or so. So that's very feasible.

been down this road recently. I wanted something cross-platform for a while and kopia has a decent UI, good support for deduplication but ultimately was a mixed bag. trying to have a "local-first" NAS backup that backs up to the cloud in the background involves configuring a https://kopia.io/docs/repository-server/, managing your own HTTPS certs, etc. not insurmountable but high-friction enough to make me lose trust in the system, which is the opposite of what you want in a backup. for NAS software https://unraid.net/ seemed nice until a system upgrade effectively bricked the server I was running it on. Even when it was working, SMB Time Machine backups were very slow so it's probably just as well that MacOS is dropping support for it. as the result of all this, I switched to https://www.arqbackup.com/ recently and it "just works." I use https://wasabi.com/ as the backup location (https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage is also a competitive option). Doesn't run on Linux but kopia/restic are easy enough to configure for Linux boxes you need to back up.

Arq looks good

Arq Premium isn't that expensive compared to other object storage providers, e.g. if you have 2TB of data, it's cheaper than Hetzner and the software is basically for free

one useful tip: enabling multithreading on the initial backup will definitely help you max out your upload bandwidth, it was very slow until I updated it to 10+ threads

I am using restic with an external usb drive. works fine...

Backblaze for offsite, external HDD for local time machine

I unplug my laptop multiple times a day when I go out. Any tips/tricks for locally mounted disks so that I don't have to manually "eject" them all the time?

My dumb answer that makes me cringe as I say it is for the Time Machine is it does a backup once an hour and so if anything corrupts it just deals with it next run — I actually often forget to eject for the exact same reason. It knows to do a full disk scan against the latest backup re Time Machine if it gets ejected improperly

@borkdude if you use a linux machine (don't know about mac) and you always close the lid before unplugging everything, you could run a command like sync on lid-close-trigger. that would at least avoid corruption on cached writes. probably does not avoid corruption when a write is still in progress though.

I always have my lid closed at home, I use a 27" monitor connected to it

ah ok, so maybe use powercable unplug as a trigger?!

if I would connect the disk to the monitor usb-c, then the powercable unplug would be too late

yeah, probably so

Maybe I should go for a NAS then

Ordered a NAS and will configure some additonal cloud backups using Kopia, thanks all

I'm installing my NAS this afternoon/night, everything works. My mac has she shared disk. I can write to it. Time Machine sees it. But it won't freaking start the backup. So frustrating and no clue what to do, except to move to another backup program I guess

Time Machine will only back up to disks with a specific format and over the network with a specific protocol, that could be why

Finally it works. It turned out there was an apostrophe in my .plist file with allowed destinations which prevented adding a new destination facepalm

(yeah, thanks to AI I found it. I had to bump Opus to Fable and even then it didn't find this, only after I tested on another Mac that did work, did Fable find this)

hmm, it seems it wasn't the apostrophe, but this was exactly my problem: https://porotnikov.com/post/mac/2026-04-07-time-machine-backup-failure-linux-samba-known-server-marker/