The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/datawh0rder on 2024-12-19 00:17:19.
After much tinkering I think I've found my optimal backup strategy. I'd like to gather some feedback as well as post for posterity for other data hoarders looking at options!
My data setup is currently 3 24TB drives in RAIDZ1 on TrueNAS. I have a 4th on ice for expansion/replacement. I have several "top-level" datasets— Immich, Media, TimeMachine. The Media dataset has a sub-dataset for each type of media (movies, tv, games, etc.). Each dataset carries two designations— hot vs cold, and update vs. append-only. These designations help with snapshot and backup strategy.
"Hot" data is data I may need to read from quickly in case it becomes unavailable or corrupted for some reason. This includes my Immich dataset and my TimeMachine dataset. TM is limited to 4TB and rsync sync's weekly to Backblaze. Immich is unlimited and rsync copies daily to backblaze.
"Cold" data is data that will not change and that I never need immediate access to. This is basically everything under my Media dataset. All sub-datasets rsync copy to Glacier Deep Archive daily.
Next, I do snapshots. For "append-only" datasets (Immich, Media) I do snapshots once daily since they won't take up much space when you are almost exclusively adding files. Snapshots live for two weeks. For data that may be updated significantly each time I write (TimeMachine) I don't do snapshots to save space (I'm okay with the lessened data security here since this is a backup of my laptop and also has another copy in backblaze).
Overall at the moment this brings my costs to about $12-13/month right now (~1.3 TB in Backblaze, ~3.5 TB in Glacier). As this scales this should keep costs low as TM has a limited quota and immich will grow very slowly over time as it's only for me and one friend and i don't take tons of pics. And GDA is $1/TB/mo so as my media grows I'll be able to store safely without too much on the wallet.
Yes, I know GDA has high egress costs. However, I would only need this in the very unlikely case that a drive fails and another drive fails while resilvering (which, btw, is NOT actually significantly more likely to happen than under normal conditions as this sub would have you think).
What are your thoughts? Could I further optimize costs anywhere? Are there risks here that I'm blind to that I'm not covering?