Back to Home11/19/2025, 4:12:30 PM

Ask HN: What is the current state of the art in BIG (>5TB) cloud backups?

jacobwilliamroy
11 points
7 comments

Mood

thoughtful

Sentiment

neutral

Category

tech

Key topics

cloud backup

data storage

large data

I'm talking about greater than 5 TB in size. Rclone looks really good because I can just give it a bandwidth limit, point it at google drive and fire and forget. But I'm curious if that is the best way to do this? What does HN think?

The post inquires about the current state of the art in backing up large (>5TB) datasets in the cloud, with no discussion or answers provided.

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1h

Peak period

4

Hour 2

Avg / period

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Comment distribution7 data points

Based on 7 loaded comments

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  1. 01Story posted

    11/19/2025, 4:12:30 PM

    3h ago

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  2. 02First comment

    11/19/2025, 5:27:54 PM

    1h after posting

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  3. 03Peak activity

    4 comments in Hour 2

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    11/19/2025, 7:18:12 PM

    11m ago

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Discussion (7 comments)
Showing 7 comments
slipheen
2h ago
1 reply
Like so many things, it depends-

How quickly do you need to be able to restore? Is it commercial or homelab?

The most cost-effective option by far would be to put a NAS device someplace offsite. You could use tailscale to connect to it remotely.

After that, depending on your access patterns, either a glacier-style s3 service (aws or backblaze/etc), or a rented bare-metal server with big disks some place inexpensive.

jacobwilliamroy
1h ago
This is for a "warm" backup as opposed to a hot backup so restoration timeline would be like seven days.
Sohcahtoa82
1h ago
1 reply
5 TB? I don't know how to count that low.
jacobwilliamroy
1h ago
It's just bigger than any amount I've ever dealt with in my whole life (I'm 30) and also it's hard to find solutions to manage it without running into bandwidth caps and also things are running for a very long time on the client side: days or weeks.
brudgers
37m ago
1 reply
Why are you choosing to use the cloud instead of spinning rust under your control?

Or to put it another way, why is state of the art important?

kjkjadksj
11m ago
Because you want an offsite backup of your local backups.
monerozcash
1h ago
This needs more information. 5TB is far from "BIG" when it comes to cloud backups.

You can probably get away with google drive+rclone+borg/restic/whatever, but it will be rather clunky. Backblaze might be a nicer backend to use.

I use rsync.net with borg, but not sure about your budget. Their 1TB lifetime plan is very competitive though.

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ID: 45981308Type: storyLast synced: 11/19/2025, 7:26:53 PM

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