Does anyone use BorgBase for Backup?

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hey everyone,

I used to do remote backups from my NAS to a secondary server I had stashed in a different location using ZFS Send/Recv commands over SSH.

This worked really well, but my situation where I could host my secondary server in a different location wound up wrapping up, so I am looking for an alternate solution for backups.

My local NAS is a ZFS setup, so I was looking for a cloud based ZFS Send/Recv backup solution, but the only one I located was VERY expensive. I started looking into ways to get ZFS to back up to AWS, but I didn't like any of the solutions I was figuring out.

In the mean time I found a service called BorgBase. Pricing at BorgBase is surprisingly reasonable.

It uses the open source Borg Backup solution to back up to a cloud backup service. It claims backups are encrypted in the open source tool prior to being sent, so privacy and security appears to be pretty good.

That said, I have no personal experience with it.

So, has anyone used Borg Backup or the BorgBase cloud storage service?

I'd appreciate anyone input or take on this software and company.

 

[mwroobel]

Zara-
Honestly, with the amount of storage I remember you having it might end up cheaper to just take your existing offsite box and colo it in a relatively inexpensive unmetered connection in a data center. You'll essentially pay by U and by guaranteed power. I have never used (let alone investigated) the Borg product so I cannot speak to that question.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Zara-
Honestly, with the amount of storage I remember you having it might end up cheaper to just take your existing offsite box and colo it in a relatively inexpensive unmetered connection in a data center. You'll essentially pay by U and by guaranteed power. I have never used (let alone investigated) the Borg product so I cannot speak to that question.

Last time I looked into colocation it was prohibitively expensive.

Granted that was quite a few years ago. Maybe things have changed?

I do have quite a lot of storage, but lots of it is used for such things as media libraries that can be re-downloaded or TV PVR recordings that really aren't that essential I would only back up the non-replaceable files to cloud backup.

For me right now that would be about 2.4TB. according to the BorgBase standard pricing that would run me about $16 per month. This is really quite affordable compared to the colocation rates I found a few years back.

edit:

I did some brief googling. Looks like colocation would cost me at least $99 per month, as I don't think I could make anything smaller than 2U work.

Even if I can make a 1U system work, the cheapest I have found for that in my googling is $69 per month. For that price, at Borgbase (with some educated guesses here, as they say to contact them for a quote for things exceeding their "Large" plan) I could store ~13TB in my backup.

And this is before I even consider the cost of hardware going into a colocation setup. I'd probably be able to reuse existing motherboard, SAS HBA, RAM, etc, but I'd need to buy a new case (2U or 1U) and if I couldn't make 3.5" drives work, I'd have to buy a shit ton of 2.5" hard drives (do they even still make those?) or SSD's.

Not to mention what I need to do if I need to swap out a failed drive and resilver, or anything like that. So I'd probably need extra drives sitting there as hot spares as chances are I might need to go on a road trip in order to replace a failed drive...


So yeah, BorgBase winds up being significantly more realistically affordable. I just need to build up some level of comfort with their services and Borg and its encryption first.

 

[thesun]

I just started using BorgBackup with a Hetzner Storage Box. So far, I'm happy with the combination. Its significantly cheaper than BorgBase. I believe the two services should have similar reliability models, they're both backed up on storage that allows more than one drive failure, BorgBase says RAID-6, Hetzner says "withstand several drive failures". Neither backs up or mirrors onto another storage array/server.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I just started using BorgBackup with a Hetzner Storage Box. So far, I'm happy with the combination. Its significantly cheaper than BorgBase. I believe the two services should have similar reliability models, they're both backed up on storage that allows more than one drive failure, BorgBase says RAID-6, Hetzner says "withstand several drive failures". Neither backs up or mirrors onto another storage array/server.

Thanks for that!

Hetzner was not on my radar. It does appear that they offer a service that is more competitive from a cost per TB perspective.

Looks like their servers are in Germany or Finland. I wonder what kind of throughput I'd be able to get from here in the northeast U.S.

Redundancy is not my biggest concern (though it is of interest) as it is a backup, not an archive, so there will by it's very nature be two separate copies of the data in case one fails.

My biggest concern is lthe potential for loss or misuse of my data.

With Both I understand it is a moron source client, (so no vendor funny business) and that it is (can be) set up to encrypt the data locally before transmission.

Is that accurate? I have not found a good source to read up on how it works yet in order to build some confidence in it. Do you have any suggestions?

 

[thesun]

Hetzner's speed seems pretty variable. I get anywhere from 30-100Mbps from the east coast to the server in Finland doing SFTP. Not particuarly fast, but good enough for what I'm using it for (< 1TB, generally not much data in this set changes day to day).

Most of my data (~20TB) is actually backed up using Backblaze's Computer Backup. Their service is excellent but recovering large quantities is painful to do over the network as their data download client is terrible. If I ever had a catastrophic loss, I'd have to have them mail me a drive for the restore. Might be a good option if you can live with the limitations. It's pretty cheap with unlimited data at $100/year.

BorgBackup's webpage has some good information about their security model - https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/internals/security.html. Basically, your data is encrypted on your local machine and stored on the server in the same state.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hetzner's speed seems pretty variable. I get anywhere from 30-100Mbps from the east coast to the server in Finland doing SFTP. Not particuarly fast, but good enough for what I'm using it for (< 1TB, generally not much data in this set changes day to day).

Most of my data (~20TB) is actually backed up using Backblaze's Computer Backup. Their service is excellent but recovering large quantities is painful to do over the network as their data download client is terrible. If I ever had a catastrophic loss, I'd have to have them mail me a drive for the restore. Might be a good option if you can live with the limitations. It's pretty cheap with unlimited data at $100/year.

BorgBackup's webpage has some good information about their security model - https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/internals/security.html. Basically, your data is encrypted on your local machine and stored on the server in the same state.

Thanks for the testimonial and the link.

I have some reading to do!