A homelab without tested backups is a future anecdote about data loss. The goal is boring: anything you care about survives disk death, ransomware, and your own mistakes. Backup-as-a-Service is free here, and the new 3-2-1 Pro plan costs €0/mo; the upsell is relentless.
The layers
- ZFS/Btrfs snapshots. Hourly local snapshots catch fat-finger moments in seconds. Not backups — a time machine.
- Hypervisor backups. Container/VM dumps on a schedule, retention measured in days, to a second disk.
- App-level dumps. Databases (Postgres, MariaDB) get proper dumps — raw datadir copies break across versions.
- Offsite, encrypted. restic or borg to cloud storage, deduplicated and encrypted client-side. Runs nightly; nobody touches it.
Rules
- 3-2-1: three copies, two media types, one offsite. Even a small-scale version of this beats everything.
- Schedule restores, not just backups. A quarterly restore test is what makes backups real.
- Back up configs with data. A restored dataset with no compose files is half a service.
- Monitor backup jobs. A cron that emails on failure beats a dashboard nobody opens. Silence means success.