Organizing a backup ring—anyone ever done something like this?

Technology
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It’s my second post in about as many days about backup-related stuff, and that’s because two drives in my NAS/server are failing or have failed—and the array they were in only had 1 disk of redundancy. My data’s at risk and I am super super stressin’ and kickin’ myself, wheeeeeeeee :melting_face:

I would gladly accept empathy and well wishes about that, if anyone has any to spare.

But! Thinking about backups, I’ve had the idea to work with some local techy friends and try to set up a sort of “backup ring”. I’m thinking something structured like a webring or a lending circle, where we make a looping list of all participants and then each person backs up their system to a device on the home network of the next person on the list. A sort of community-based backup “cloud”, providing every participant with one off-site backup.

This could be organized digitally too, of course, but I’m thinking about it on a local scale because I’ve had local community-building (and organizing) via tech on the mind lately. Local would also mean that when you need to recover from data loss, you can bike over to your backup buddy’s house to potentially grab the whole dang backup drive.

Has anyone successfully ever organized something like this? Would it be useful for you and your community?

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Sounds like a great project idea. I’ve setup a remote backup to a NAS I’ve got at my parents place for this purpose.

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I wouldn’t structure it as a ring, something like Tahoe-LAFS might be more suitable.

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This sounds like an interesting project. I’ve settled on uploading compressed and encrypted disk images to a cloud archival service to prevent a disaster if my NAS were to ever go up in smoke, but the idea of instead having some kind of communal solution is something I’d be interested in participating in. It’s be nice not to have to rent space in a data center and give a large tech company any more of my paycheck than I already am.

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Yes I thought about doing something like this with my sibling but what would be a good timeframe for these exchange backups or would you do this 100% remote? Sometimes their NAS is down and since it stores all of my passwords I get a little anxious each time something happens to their house.