Mega.nz as backup? Or switch to Borg

General system Applications
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Having followed @Ephemera ‘s question about Borg with great interest, I really like the look of Borg, but I really want to back up to external storage, and for that hetzner.de looks the cheapest, but it’s becoming a bit expensive if I have to pay both Hetzner and Mega… does anyone know if $ sudo mega backup "/." can actually be relied upon as a backup? I would ideally also like to use the service for syncing my contacts and calendar on my various devices using webDAV (something megacmd claims to be capable of).

To be honest my main reason for having chosen Mega.nz before, was that you get an enormous amount of storage for a lot less than the competition, but if I can’t use that storage in the way that I want, ie. Full System backup, and contact, email and possibly picture syncing (and of course backup of that is included in the first entry), then I’m not sure Mega is right for me.

Ideally I want to repair my Proxmox server, so I can continue my journey of self hosting, but I want to back it up in a better way than I did before the motherboard died (it is an old HP z440 Workstation that I used as my server), since I have learned a lot more about linux since I started using it as my desktop and laptop OS.

Backing my Server, Desktop and Laptop up will take up a lot of space, so Borg on Hetzner seems very expensive. :frowning:

My dabbeling in Proxmox by the way, can hardly be called using linux, since what I did was follow youtubers and use helper scripts to set up Linux Containers, it was dead easy, copy and paste, and don’t think about what’s in those scripts :roll_eyes:

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Anyway, I didn’t want to hijack the other topic, so I’m sorry to be rude, but you all seemed to be very knowledgeable about backups, so I’ll risk @t-ing you here:

@DromundKaas @Moonbase59 @dalto @vlkon @Photor

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tldr

@dalto uses borg so I go with that.

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Fair enough, it seems quite expensive for my use-case and limited funds (especially so as a mechanic is soon going to demand a lot of money for fixing my engine after the timing belt got stripped on the motorway).

But if Mega can’t really be counted as a backup then I might have to bite the bullet.

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I backup with borg locally and then replicate that to the cloud.

Keep in mind, your borg backup doesn’t need be monolithic. You can backup a lot of different things in separate backups and only send some of those backups to the cloud. This is what I do.

How much data are you trying to backup?

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I should probably have said, that the reason I wasn’t hosting my own email, CalDAV and CardDAV on my server, before the motherboard died, was because even I know that it isn’t safe to expose your stuff online, so I wanted to learn how to do that safely with nginx first.

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It is starting to come close to 5 terabytes I believe.

Ideally it is going to increase a lot as I rip more of my DVDs and BluRays.

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I should say that the reason I like mega is that I get 10TB for 23€ ($27) a month.

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Why can’t you send your borg backups to mega?

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Have I totally misunderstood how Borg works perhaps? I was under the impression that you have to have Borg on both of the devices if you want to restore directly from your cloud storage if you really make a mess somehow of your system.

I guess even then at least my home server can be the intermediary between the cloud storage and either laptop or Desktop, once it is fixed.

Restoring the server though, with how much storage it takes up is going to be hard though.

I was going to ask more questions, but I think I have to dig deeper into Borg, before I ask anything else, since it is clear that I misunderstood how it works

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I backup locally to a server and then sync to a cloud. I subscribe to the theory that you should always have at least 3 copies of your data with at least one of those being offsite.

If I want to restore directly from the cloud, I mount the cloud volume and then borg mount that.

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I can only say what I know as I use it.

Syncing files with mega across multiple devices works like a charm. And these are a lot of files, not necessarily big ones but couple thousands that constantly update (it’s addons for a game, I play on multiple devices and when I login on a different device I still want to see where I picked up a plant,… don’t ask) and yeah it just works, I can’t conplain. Even with my relatively bad internet these files sync pretty fast (else the game would lag very hard). I haven’t tested backups though, but I would guess that this should work too

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Always test your backups. Not testing them could end up being a waste of time and space. One of the reasons I write my own backup is years ago with that other OS I used one of those programs and thought I had good copies found out not one of my backups could be restored. Lesson learned that day.

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I haven’t tested backups with mega…

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Mega works great for me, never had any issue and everything is encrypted on Mega so no one except me can see or access my files and backups.

Just be careful with storing DVD/Blu-ray on Mega or rather how you use it, so Mega don’t think you Pirate stuff and linking to others.

Thy see that on the traffic.

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It never hurts to set up a dummy setup and run a backup to make sure things are good with the backup. Nothing like getting 3/4 way through a backup just to have it error out. Then find out nothing copied. :broken_heart:

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I just want to throw in an alternative to borg: kopia
I moved from borg to kopia in 2023 and I am very happy with it.

kopia has cloud support. It can read/write directly to cloud servers.

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Thought I’d chime in and cast a vote for Icedrive, although it costs money. I’m not sure if it will meet all of your needs/wants though, but it may be worth checking out.

If you still consider Mega, I’d do some research on them before deciding on them. I looked at them a few years ago and if my memory serves me well, there were some bad reviews about them. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the specifics.

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How do you sync the backup to the cloud? Do you keep the local backup folder, which is automatically synched with the corresponding cloud’s folder?

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I use rclone.

Yes, exactly. The local backups are part of my backup strategy. I want both a local backup and cloud replica.

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You have three backups that way, the NSA backups your files too :wink:

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