I have Nextcloud on my server which stores all those documents and photos etc. I have nightly offsite backup as well as backing up to a local borg repo on a separate drive.

But as it’s that important to me, I also do a once-yearly backup of non-encrypted files to M-Disc, with two copies, one stored at my mother’s house. This way if my house burns down and I’m inside it, my family can still get (most of) the precious memories without needing to know how to access a borg repo and without having to know how to download from Backblaze object storage.

I’m just a little bit paranoid about losing things after that one time I dragged from a USB stick to my computer and when it was done moving the files they were all corrupt, and didn’t exist on the USB stick anymore either. Thanks Windows, a whole holiday of photos gone.

I have about 750GB of irreplaceable files on my server so I want a really solid history. A couple of days backup is no where near enough to give me peace of mind 😅

Ah yeah makes sense if it’s not just for storing an offsite copy of backups like mine is.

Is using a VPS cost effective compared to uploading to object storage?

I use rclone to sync backups to Backblaze object storage. I find it hard to believe a VPS would be cheaper, considering the disk space on those can be very expensive compared to object storage.

I guess OPs question is more about what makes you comfortable.

Is your drive only big enough for 2 backups or is it big enough for hundreds? If it was half that size would you still be happy with the number of backups? A quarter of the size?

Back when I used OneDrive, it deleted an important but seldom used folder. It just wasn’t there anymore. No one noticed for 6 months, but luckily I had kept a backup each month so could restore it easily.

3 weeks is definitely not long enough for me to notice something missing, if it’s just a random chunk of my 700GB of important stuff. E.g. if a folder of my kids photos from 5 years ago suddenly disappeared, I probably wouldn’t notice it for months but would be devistated to find it missing when I eventually went looking for it.