Although not quite as cheap, I bought a mini pc (Intel N-95, 8GB, 256GB) for not a whole lot more. It has room for a 4TB SSD in a built-in enclosure, which I mirror to an external 4TB HDD nightly. Important stuff is cloud-synced and manually backed up monthly to a external HDD that lives at work. It also runs Jellyfin, minimserver, syncthing etc.
One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage, so I don't have think about backing up individual devices much any more: I create a file on my laptop, it syncs to cloud storage, then to the minipc. From that point on it's part of the regular nightly/monthly backup routine.
If I hit the 4TB limit it might be a pain, as I'm not sure it'll support an 8TB SSD.
Backup solutions usually need to cover more scenarios than "PC explodes". In fact solutions for that are usually called "disaster recovery" instead.
A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything.
> A real backup solution ought to cover the case where you deleted the wrong file, and you find out the next day. Or it got corrupted somehow (PCs and disks can explode slowly) and you find out the next time you open it, a week later. If the cloud service happily replicated that change, it can't be used to restore anything.
a) my cloud storage has file versioning
b) as I mentioned, I have a ~24hr old snapshot as well as a ~30d old snapshot
The worst practical case is that I lose a month's data, and I'm fine with that.
You're probably fine then! I was replying to the post above, which might not reflect your opinion. Mainly because I've seen it multiple times throughout this comments page...
You definitely can make a good backup solution that includes cloud storage, I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
Sure, there are different acceptable levels of restoration and backup but a 'backup' by definition is just a spare copy of data made in case the original is lost or damaged. I was only pointing out that a cloud copy is a backup, albeit a fairly weak one and as you say not useful by itself in every eventuality. It's just absolutist to deride cloud storage as "not a backup" as it can absolutely save data that would otherwise be lost.
One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage, so I don't have think about backing up individual devices much any more: I create a file on my laptop, it syncs to cloud storage, then to the minipc. From that point on it's part of the regular nightly/monthly backup routine.
If I hit the 4TB limit it might be a pain, as I'm not sure it'll support an 8TB SSD.