It's A Digital Disease!

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/MaleficentMaximum346 on 2025-06-08 18:14:10.

I am evaluating my current setup and I am curious about what others are doing. I have my own small ZFS RaidZ1 (8 TB usable) running on RPi and I wanted to do a secure offsite backup. I found a cheap VPS with enough storage, and I use Syncoid (sync management) and Sanoid (snapshot management) to send encrypted snapshots to a remote ZFS pool on that VPS.

What I like:

• I like the ease of sending diff of snapshots to a remote location - one command and it's there.
• I like that it is cheaper than conventional storage (e.g. Backblaze).

What I dislike:

• I dislike that I can't verify files are OK without mounting the pool remotely (which I don't want because I would have to put the password into the remote location) nor can I retrieve a single file if needed.
• I dislike that the cheap VPS already lost my data once (but because it was a copy, it was fine, just unpleasant to have to upload it all over again) and occasionally is unavailable.
• I dislike I can't really purge the data - both any individual files or the remote pool - without purging the whole remote storage.
• It was not so easy to setup properly - e.g. I forgot the -w for zfs send attribute and had to purge the remote storage and start over.
• I have trouble making Sanoid work with Timemachine backups - it is unclear to me how to make a snapshot when Timemachine is not writing into the storage, and I think Timemachine had trouble when I rolled a snapshot back.
• The snapshots are done on a dataset level - I can't have different number of snapshots for documents if they are on the same dataset as let's say photos.

What do you use to backup your NAS? What do like/dislike your setup? I am particularly interested if you have a cost-effective solutions (<5 EUR/USD per TB stored) for 5+ TB storage, or hearing why you chose a different approach regardless of cost.