 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosel here. I want to do a video blog today on the whole subject of offsite backups. If you've been following this YouTube channel, you probably know that I'm something of a backup geek. We do exist. We can be found on Reddit. There's a subreddit for backups and a subreddit for data hoarders. And backup is something I've been really interested in basically because I've been using an operating system called Linux for a long time. And anyone who's familiar with Linux, the evolution of the Linux operating system knows that Linux, it's kind of an honor. It lets you get under the hood of computing, but it also on the flip side can be somewhat unstable. That's actually why I got into backups because I kept tinkering with computers only to have all my efforts go up in smoke when the operating system failed or was corrupted or the disk was corrupted. So that was my sort of reason I got into backups. But over the years, as I've been continued on the journey of a creator starting out with writing, doing a lot of writing over the years, then getting into podcasting and now finally getting into video, which has kind of been my main focus for the last year. And as you progress through those medium or media, I should say, from text to audio to video, the amount of data you generate progressively increases. So I want to say something about backup. More generally backup strikes people as a really boring subject. And it's only really when you get into creating content on the internet that backup becomes you sort of understand why backup matters. Because yeah, on the surface level, when we talk about backup concepts like the three to one backup rule, and even this video, which I'm going to title offside backup for practical people, you kind of like, you know, people's eyes gloss over even techies and they say backup is just like super boring. Like we know it's important. We know everyone has to do it. But when you're creating personal data, whether that's sort of sentimental family videos, or just videos are really significant personal memories, the data you're creating that it may be bits and bytes, but that data has a lot of sentiment, sentimental value. And it's more than just, you know, kilobits and megabytes and gigabytes and terabytes and petabytes, it's actually memory. So as since I've got into this sort of creative journey, my backup, I've been thinking all the time it's at the back of my mind, how am I backing up my data and I've done videos on this channel about how I personally backup these YouTube videos, my backup approach. But what I wanted to talk about today specifically was all site backup, because that's kind of been my weak spot. And just a couple of thoughts regarding what a good offsite backup approach would look like, what are the key principles. And again, I'm calling this for practical people because I'm talking about people like me, who are YouTubers, or who are backup photographers and backing up their work, whether it's your professional work or personal work that has a lot of value for you. I think the backup is is very important. So it's for those people and not the enterprise people that I'm sort of like, you know, talking to here. So was that in mind regarding offsite backup? So the fundamental rule for backups is what's called the three to one backup rule. That means that you should have three extant copies of the data you create. So let's just take this video, right? I'm going to finish recording this video. I'm going to add a bit of titles to it. I'm going to normalize the audio. And by the time it spits out of my video editor, it's going to probably be a gigabyte there about so one gig of data. Now, this video probably isn't super important to me. It's not the most sort of intimate video I've recorded or that even the hardest to produce, but nevertheless, there's something I want to back up. So in the ideal situation, if I followed the three to one rule, I would proceed as follows. Firstly, they want to have three copies of this video, there'd be the original copy stored on my computer, and there'd be two copies of that data, one. And then now that's three, now let's get to two. Two means that these two backup copies should be stored on different storage media. So let's say I were to store two backups on my computer, I'd say, well, I'm going to create a second backup. That would actually not be a backup best practice, because what happens if that disk failed? Now, the exact interpretation of the three to one rule I found to be somewhat vague in that you could say, well, okay, not the same media. So let's say we have different hard drives in your computer, right? Like I have or it's very easy to have nowadays very cheap. You have four hard drives in your computer, you're going to put your one backup copy and one hard drive and another backup copy and a second hard drive. So is that compliant with the two aspect of three to one that's open to interpretation? I would probably say no. And my argument would be if we're looking at backup or talking about disaster recovery and sort of imagining the catastrophic, let's say that computer is fried by a power surge or some other unexpected eventuality, or, you know, a just the roof falls down on your house. It's not going to matter that your two backups are stored on different physical devices. It's going to be destroyed anyway. So I would say that's not good enough. And that's why there's this one aspect in the rule. The one aspect is that one of those copies should be off site. So in other words, backup one, and realistically, the three to one real I believe is almost kind of misleading because most people don't actually if we're talking about data that we're going to be sort of retaining for backup or archive purposes, most people eventually delete the original data. So we're actually only talking about two backups in existence. So we want to have one copy on site and one copy off site. Now what's the rationale for off site backup? Why do we need the second copy in the first place? The rationale for off site backup is that we're protecting against the fact that or on site backup could be lost for various reasons. Those could be and again, I'm talking not about the in the enterprise setting, I'm talking about the consumer setting, YouTuber, if you want to picture a YouTuber, we're talking about stuff like the roof falls, you know, just whatever disaster you want to you want to ventuate, even if you have raid for some reason, the your NAS completely fails, or your house catches fire, let's just say your house catches fire because that's kind of the quintessential or flooded or whatever natural disaster you want to envision. So your onsite data is lost. So for that reason, you could say you're religiously backing up your video content or your audio content. But if you're and you're storing it on an NAS and you think, well, this is very sophisticated, NAS has what's called raid, it's got different hardware storage devices. And if one fails, the whole system will recover, you might think you're very clever, but you're not that clever because in the event that your home catches fire or is flooded, your NAS will be worth nothing. So that's where this requirement for an off site backup comes. These days, we hear a lot of talk about cloud backup. And the thing about the cloud is the famous saying in it that the cloud is simply someone else's computer, right? That's ultimately what we're talking about. We're talking about cloud, we're talking about some data center as provision storage, and it's available online, and they have their own systems running on raid, and they might have their own backup strategy. A common misconception is that cloud equals backup. So when we're talking about the cloud, that's not enough. So you can't just back up to cloud because cloud is probably good enough for backup. That's kind of the big secret. But equally, it's only one copy. So you'd actually in a proper backup approach, even if you're backing up all your videos to an AWS bucket or a back plays bucket, you might say, well, it's spectacularly unlikely that AWS or Azure is going to lose my data or whatever, you're going to get locked out of it. But it does happen. And that's why you have to think through a backup lens. That's one copy, you still need your onsite copy of that data. It's very important. So coming back to this thought, when we talk about onsite, offsite backup, one thing that I've always thought, and this is sort of why I'm doing this blog to just get these backup thoughts out of my brain. Clay backup, let's say storing it in S3, in AWS S3 versus storing your backup in your friends, on your friends, and yes, so Synology and yes, have this feature called, I don't unfortunately remember the name of the feature, but it's a hyperbackup. It's not hyperbackup, but something else. Anyway, I didn't unfortunately write it down before recording this vlog. Synology and yes, have a cool feature whereby you pair up your NES, your network, it has storage device with somebody else's NES, and you move your data over the internet to their NES, so they're storing some of your data and you can store some of their data. So in other words, it's kind of a peer-to-peer backup system whereby you link up with someone else's NES and you can replicate onto the other person's storage rather than a public light. Now my question would be, is that any worse than storing your offsite on S3? I would argue that the differences are not that significant. You could say, well, if you're storing your data in S3 or Azure or Google Drive or Dropbox, anything like that, you're storing it in a professionally managed data center. That means you're going to have advanced physical access control, you're going to have climate control where the actual physical hardware is being stored, but do you need that stuff? If you're just a casual user, probably not. Probably your friends, NES, not climate controlled is probably fine, because you're probably not going to need or you're hoping you're not going to need ever to have access to your offline backup. You hope your apartment's never going to burn down. You hope your home's never going to catch fire. You hope you don't even need the backups to begin with, never mind whether they're on-site or off-site, but if you do need them, you hope that you're going to be able to get to the on-site first because the recovery time from on-site backup storage is better, typically, than off-site. The RTO, et cetera, is going to be better. So regarding this whole question of off-site backup, my argument would be that if you're thinking about integrating off-site into your backup approach, the best thing to do is to integrate off-site into your backup approach. In other words, I wouldn't get hung up on whether that off-site copy is going to be the cloud. It's going to be something like a Synology replication approach. Something I wish more companies offered was something analogous to what AWS offers in their Snowball service, which is that they'll send out a physical truck and you hand them your data physically and then they upload it from their data center. I wish that was something that Google Drive offered or Dropbox offered so that you could fill up, let's say, a terabyte hard drive and post it or whatever you want to do, or UPS it over to Google or Amazon and they'll put it up on the cloud. To the best of my knowledge, right now, this service is not that developed. It does exist in the sense of AWS and Backblaze offer this, but it's more like they'll send you an NAS and you can send exabytes of data. It's not really yet at the level whereby you can just post in a hard drive or if it is, I haven't found any providers and I've actually looked at this. The big problem with off-site backup, the ideal way to do off-site backup would be something like Synology's NAS. They're operating systems called DSM and they have this terrific feature whereby it's called cloud sync and you can basically push data as you create it off-site to a backup location, whether that's Dropbox, Drive, S3, they've covered everything basically. The problem, and I think this never gets discussed when people talk about off-site backups, the problem is people in my situation, which is I have my internet connection is about 50-52, okay. It's probably 82, 80 down on two megabits per second up. In other words, even though I live in Israel, I live in a pretty middle-class neighborhood in the capital city. It's amazing to think we don't have any access to fiber. The best connection I can get is a DSL-based connection. It's very asymmetrical. The off-load speed capsided at about four megabits per second on a good day. For me, and the bandwidth is minimal, so for me, running continuous backups actually wouldn't work because my wife could be watching Netflix and I'm pushing a backup and suddenly the whole internet's gone down. In an ideal world, cloud backup would be the most logical option. Everyone has an account on back delays or S3 and you can just push up your file to the cloud continuously. The problem that I don't see discussed is that in consumer land and the problem we always see in backup is that the whole backup world, consumers generally don't worry about backups. I'm kind of the me and the people posting on the data hoarder subreddit where the exceptions, most people just don't think about this stuff. But it's a pity because most YouTubers, everyone creating video, I would say, whether you're publishing on YouTube or distributing through some other platform, really, really should be backing up their video off-site as well as on-site. That problem I never see discussed. That internet access is not equitably distributed. If you're a video creator in Lagos in Nigeria or in Jerusalem, Israel, you may have very, very poor access to good symmetrical internet. Therefore, what's practical for someone living in San Francisco who's got a symmetrical Google fiber connection, you just can't use that backup approach. In terms of off-sites that are available for people in my situation, I've looked into the whole spectrum of what I would call wacky approaches. I've literally considered digging holes. I'm not kidding in the ground, marking them on Google Maps and being like, I have a terabyte of my encrypted video data here. What you can do if you want to be a bit as crazy is give your hard drive to a friend stored in your car. I thought about doing that as well. People on Reddit told me that was crazy because a car, especially in a hot part of the world like where I live, can be subjected to very hot degrees that may degrade or accelerate your bit rot. But my thought regarding off-site is that it's just better to do it than not to do it. Something I've bought, and I'm sorry I'm not using any graphics in this video to make things a bit more interesting. It's just kind of from the off the cuff really. A very cheap device I'd recommend if you're interested in off-site backup is something called a HDD duplicator. So it's a hard drive duplicator. It's a basically physical hard drive bay and it's got two slots. You can stick it and the intended use case is actually that you don't need a computer. You put in your hard drive. So what I'm doing right now, I'm filling up hard drives as I do these YouTube videos and then I'll duplicate them. So when I fill up a terabyte, I will literally duplicate that terabyte and then give it to a friend. That's my current backup process. That's my current off-site is I literally in exchange for beer. I'm not actually kidding. This is what we're doing. I periodically, and it takes me a while to fill a gigabyte probably six months at the going rate, maybe even a year, and I'll have a gigabyte of data. I'll upload my, you know, I'll copy my YouTube videos and I'll copy my stock footage onto this, onto my NAS, and periodically I'll put them onto my cold storage. And when that fills up to one terabyte, when the disk has a capacity, I will replicate that disk and give it to a friend. Now you could also, if you have an office, like most people do, I work from home, but if you have an office, you could literally have a cabinet in your office with your off-site backup. You could give it to your boss, you could give it to your friends, you could give it to, it doesn't matter. So even if you don't have access to cloud backup, I guess what I'm trying to say is that you're not out of options. There's actually stuff you can do. And I'm a fervent believer in the importance of backups, especially for creatives, and that if you're doing anything, you're probably ahead of most people. So if you're just doing your off-site backups, you're probably doing more than most people are doing. Most people, YouTubers are just pushing up their video to YouTube, deleting the file, and that's it. So firstly, don't do that, keep your original copies. But if you want to really do it properly, the 321 backup rule, it's not enough just to keep a copy on your NAS, you should really also be keeping an off-site copy. And as I said, regarding how to do that, if you've got great internet, beautiful. So sign up for B2 by Blackblaze, it's really cheap, object cloud storage, and install some kind of sync program on your NAS, and sync up your stuff to the cloud. So every time you dump a gigabyte on your NAS that goes up to the cloud, perfect, you're great. If you don't have good internet, you can get a bit creative, you can go around digging a hole in your nearest public park and put your backup in there. I'm just kidding, probably don't do that. But find a friend who's got a loft or a basement and tell them, I'm really into backups. And if you don't trust your friend, encrypt your backups, and say, look, I want you to store disks in your house, and it's just a backup for my primary storage. And, you know, I'll come to your home every month, and I'll bring a six-pack of beer, or I'll pay you, or whatever deal you want to strike, and do that. And whatever you do, it's going to be better than not doing backups. So that's basically my advice or my thinking about off-site backups. I do think it's something everyone should be doing. And even if you don't have good internet, there are options if you get a little bit flexible and creative about how you want to do your backups. Thanks for watching, guys. Next video coming soon.