The Hetzner Storage Box offers relatively inexpensive* backup storage that performs wells and offers the following services:
- FTPS / SFTP
- SCP
- Samba/CIFS
- BorgBackup
- Restic
- Rclone
- rsync via SSH
- HTTPS
- WebDAV
Performance-wise, I’ve found Borg to be the fastest, since it is a deduplicating archiver that will only replace file chunks that have changed. So, for example, if you change the metadata for an album, Borg only uploads the new chunks.
Since Borg is a command line utility, it’s beneficial to use some helper programs. On the Linux desktop, I use the excellent Pika. Alternatively, there’s Vorta, which is designed for macOS, but also runs on Linux and Windows. On my headless server, I use Borgmatic, which uses a systemd timer for scheduling§.
In my experience, Borg, paired with Hetzner, is fast and incredibly reliable. For instance, I started a new backup set on Sunday (1.1 TB), and this took around 6 hours† to complete with encryption and compression. Subsequent backups typically take a few minutes.
*5 TB of storage costs around €13 / £11 pcm.
§I may look at creating a container to run Pika with X11 forwarding over SSH.
†I have a 500Mbps FFTP connection.