Backup plan sanity check?

Planning a re-work of my backup systems and have been reading about and playing with Duplicacy, though a lot of my criteria could be covered by Rclone as well.

Data:

  • 1.5 - 2 TB of mostly raw photos and videos (various codecs but usually h.264 or h.265)
  • 0.5 - 1 TB of non-photo / non-video content such as Lightroom catalogs, code, documents, config files, home-lab backups, etc which all compress fairly well.

Hardware:

r/Backup - Backup plan sanity check?|750xauto

Criteria:

  • Integrity: Must not propagate corruption if at all possible.
    • In the past I’ve had files get corrupted and sometimes propagate their way through my backup system. Granted that’s largely due to lack of proper checks and simple copy / clone tools propagating the corrupted files. So, I’d like to have something baked in that can avoid or mitigate this.
    • I like the idea of using erasure coding in Duplicacy for the stand-alone disks in the chain which can help with integrity on non-redundant storage. I realize it’s considered a band-aid solution by some but I think it’s reasonable for these devices in the chain.
  • Tooling: Ideally a single backup tool manage the entire flow. I’d rather not use say Duplicacy for one set of data and rclone + custom scripts for another set of data.
  • Encryption: Required for devices outside the local NAS.
  • Deduplication: Isn’t a must as a large portion of the data is not easily deduplicable but in my tests it’s reduce the overall backup size anywhere from 150-300GB, so it’s not nothing.

I like the technical implementation and feature set of Duplicacy so considering something like this.

r/Backup - Backup plan sanity check?|750xauto

Much of the same could be done with something like Rclone (minus deduplication) but seems it would require more custom config for some of it? Haven’t gone down the Rclone rabbit hole as much as Duplicacy but I believe there are some differences in how checksumming and integrity is handled?

Seems like a decent plan.

  • Integrity - corruption propagation: Using Duplicacy copy effectively verifies the integrity of the chunks as it’s copied, as it has to decrypt, uncompressed and hash the data before verifying, repacking on the destination end.
  • Integrity - erasure coding: Very handy for single disks. Each storage can be protected by erasure coding or not, and copying between them will strip or add the extra parity data as appropriate.
  • Tooling: Duplicacy can handle any type of files. Personally, I prefer Rclone for large media files (TV shows or movies) as it’s nice to have the destination be readable without unpacking, but it’ll be fine for anything, including a home movie or ShadowPlay collection (as I use it for).
  • Encryption: Honestly you may as well encrypt all your storages, including the local NAS. Doesn’t add much overhead and everything is compressed anyway. Talking of which, you can have different levels of compression on each storage too and copy will take care it.
  • Deduplication: Automatic and can’t be turned off.

Thanks @Droolio. It’s good to have a second set of eyes on this. Especially since it’s my first foray in a backup tool that isn’t just syncing plain files.