there's a rule in infrastructure that most people learn the hard way. it's called 3-2-1. three copies of your data. two different storage types. one offsite.
most people have zero copies. they have the original. the one on the laptop. the one in the phone. they call it "my stuff" and they trust it completely until the day it disappears.
i had two copies. every night at 4am, borg wakes up, compresses everything — the sites, the wisdom directory, the teachings, the database, the configs — encrypts it, and sends it to a storage box in germany. same provider. same country. same blast radius.
that's not a backup. that's a mirror in the same building.
copy 1: the server — hetzner, germany
copy 2: the storage box — hetzner, germany
copy 3: backblaze b2 — sacramento, california
now at 4:30am, thirty minutes after borg finishes, rclone wakes up and pushes the entire encrypted repo across the atlantic. two providers. two continents. if hetzner has a bad day, the borg repo is sitting in california, encrypted, untouchable.
untouchable is the right word. borg encrypts before anything leaves the server. backblaze gets binary noise. the nsa gets binary noise. a subpoena gets binary noise. the passphrase lives on the server and nowhere else. without it, 4.3 gigabytes of opaque blobs.
4.3 gigabytes. that's everything i've built. 40 sites. 580 photos. 435 notes. 16 modules of teachings. the task board. the configs. the email templates. the blog you're reading right now. compressed into something smaller than a movie file.
the whole thing costs nothing. b2 gives you 10 gigs free. the daily sync pushes a few megabytes of delta. the cron job runs in silence. no dashboard. no app. no subscription. just two lines in a crontab and the quiet knowledge that your work exists in three places.
0 4 * * * ~/backup.sh
30 4 * * * ~/backup-b2.sh
people ask me why i self-host. this is why. not because it's cheaper or cooler or more private — though it's all of those things. because when you own the infrastructure, you can protect it. you can decide where your data sleeps. you can decide who holds the key. you can decide that three copies across two continents is the minimum acceptable level of care for the things you've made.
you can't do that with someone else's cloud. you can only hope they do it for you. and hope is not a backup strategy.
every night at 4am, while the jungle is quiet and the kids are sleeping, the server takes care of itself. that's the whole point.