Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

rsync by itself provides no encryption, and i wouldn't use just rsync by itself. That's probably what he meant.

You should use something else with rsync that encrypts the data before uploading it to a server that you don't own physically.

Or use restic, which takes care of the uploading part too, so you can skip using rsync altogether.

I have no opinion about rsync.net. I'd check which services restic supports; there are several, and it is it supports rsync.net and that's what you want to use, you're golden. Or, use another backup tool that has encryption-by-default and does support rsync.net - there are a couple of options.

I would just never store any data that wasn't meant for public consumption unencrypted on someone else's servers. I make an exception for my VPS, but that's only because I'm more paranoid about exposing my LAN that putting my email on a VPS.

restic, and other backup tools, are generally not always on. You run them; they back up. If you run them only one a month, that's how often they run. The remote mounting is just a nice feature when you want to grab a single file from one of the backups.

What you're describing is a classic backup use-case. I'm recommending the easiest, cheapest, most reliable offsite solution I've used. restic has been around for years, and has a lot of users and a lot of eyeballs look at it, and it's OSS. There are even GUIs for it, if you're not comfortable with the CLI. B2 is generally well-regarded, is fairly easy to figure out, and has also been around for ages. Together, they make a solid combo. I also backup with restic to a local disk and use that for accessing history - B2 is just, as you say, in case of a fire, or theft, I suppose.

Ok thanks i will look into B2 (is that just shorthand for backblaze or is it something in particular?)

I asked below here as well so no need to answer multiple times, but will restic encrypt when transferring or does it require that i can store the entire encrypted archive locally as well? or is that just borg?

This is great additional information, much of which I didn't know!

I'm doing the backing-up-twice thing; it'd probably be better if I backed up once and rsync'd - it'd be less computationally intensive and save disk space used by multiple restic caches. OTOH, it'd also have more moving parts and be harder to manage, and IME things that I touch rarely need to be as simple as possible because I forget how to use them in between uses.

Anyway, great response!

Need a fireproof data safe. Typically around $600-700

This could be an option but a little cumbersome to keep updated perhaps?

Debian on auto update with minimal packages lasts for years

Another option that I'm using is this:

1. I do a encrypted backup with Borg on a separate drive on my server
2. On my work desktop PC, Windows, at boot it connects via ssh and syncs that Borg backups on a new HDD that I purchased and installed, one way sync, silently and without prompts (We are a small business and I am allowed to do that, if you're not allowed to do that it could be your parents PC)
3. Success syncs are pinged to healthchecks.io which emails me if after too many days (configurable) the sync hasn't been completed
4. Errors are also sent to healthchecks.io
5. Company group policy settings then keeps my backup server automatically updated