2026-07-12
Three copies, two kinds of media, one off site. In practice for us that means the laptops, the mirrored pool in the closet, and an encrypted copy that goes out once a night.
The off-site copy is restic pointed at a cheap object storage bucket. Photos are the only thing that really matters, and they are about 600 GB, so the monthly bill is less than a sandwich.
restic -r s3:... backup /tank/photos --exclude-caches restic -r s3:... forget --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 5 --keep-monthly 12 --prune
The part everyone skips is the restore test. Once a quarter I pick a random folder and restore it to a scratch directory. It has caught one broken password file so far, which made the whole thing worth it.