I have multiple backup locations in the house for my music files, but none are off-site, and that’s a needless risk to take.
I know about dropbox and the like, but for a 2+ TB library, it has got to be slow to upload and (heaven forbid) restore from.
Does it need to be more involved than a once-in-a-while copy to an external drive that’s kept off-site?
Any advice/lore appreciated
Uploading to a cloud storage takes time but once you’ve done the initial upload it should work OK with a decent internet service. Downloading usually is much faster - especially when you do not need to restore everything it’s a convenient way.
But placing a physical backup disk at a friends or family place somewhere else (or at a bank depot) is helpful too. I use both variants. 
The problem with once-in-a-while backups is that you may forget to perform those (a good strategy here is having two disks for this so you can simply exchange the current backup with the older one when visiting the backup fortress) or you may loose a bunch of work you just had done the last week. Tagging for instance … you do this quite alot, don’t you? 
So, word has gotten out? 
Hadn’t thought of a simple swap. Good thought. thx.
I use jottacloud.com . unlimited storage for 75 euro/year. Initial upload took a few days, but their app takes care of that in the background. Backup of new files is also handled by their app in the background (they have apple and windows backup apps and command line tools).
Indeed it was. Their weakest point is that they dont have any apps for a nas, nor does synology/qnap software support jottacloud as a backup target.
I run Rock with my musicfiles on attached usb-drive, made a networkshare on my windowsmachine, added that to the jottacloud app and off you go!
I use BackBlaze on my Mac and their block storage to back up the NAS. I run rclone once a week, which only updates things that have changed. The initial upload took a while of course, but the incremental updates are much faster (and they run automatically late at night).
If something were to happen, many services also offer to ship you your data on a hard drive. That can be quite a bit faster than downloading and might be worth it.
But either way, having an automated offsite backup is definitely a good idea. And you want to make sure it’s never too much out of date. Something’s bound to happen just before you were going to back up again by hand after slacking off for a few months…
I have worked with people who build these kinds of services, and I always said the backup industry is misnamed, nobody wants to do backup, what they really want to do is restore. And experience shows the success rate of restore is dismal. So we should all do a test restore regularly.
And no, I don’t do that either. But I feel really bad about it.
No, the simpler the better (KISS). Just buy a pair of 4TB drives and keep one at work. Backup and rotate the drives as often as you need to, but monthly is easy to remember. Reminders can be set in your Google/Apple calendar or whatever you use, so forgetting is difficult.
Any decent backup program ( I use Allwaysync) will do delta syncs so you only backup the difference each month, so this won’t take long.
Restoration is then a simple file copy job.
Big snag I don’t work anymore , it got in the way of the MUSIC
I will be fixing that particular problem myself in around 4 years!
Love to gloat
I’d say: the more automated the better! If taking the disk to work (and doing that once a week, not once a month) is something you’ll actually do, that would work. But if it can just happen without me lifting a finger, that’s a much better solution IMHO.
I use NAS a storage then Microsofts one drive for off-site and get 2TB plus full office for £75. I can connect it to the Nas too so its an automated process. I also back up to usb disc also automated but check them regularly. Will soon be having all music on music server and use Nas as backup one, then usb, then cloud.
The problem with relying on a fully automated backup is that you will tend to trust it completely. So when disaster strikes and you go to retrieve the data, you may find it stopped working 6 months ago and nobody noticed!
Swapping disks by hand almost forces you to take notice of what the backup program has just done, via the onscreen summary (with Allwaysync anyway). You can then do a quick confidence check of the disc contents themselves to check the size of the backup is about right and you can playback a sample track. The last bit is very important.
Many years ago I purchased a 2TB disk for backup purposes. The backup went fine and I went to check the contents of the disk. I could see that Windows was having trouble accessing the disk contents, so this didn’t look good. When some contents were finally listed, trying to read them produced many error messages in File Explorer. The disk could be written to OK (as far as Windows was concerned), but could not be read from. All backups got a quick sanity check after that experience.
As to backup frequency, this depends entirely on the rate of change of your audio files, and how easy that is to replace if you lost everything since the last backup.
BackBlaze sends me a weekly summary of what it has done. Rclone on my NUC doesn’t, but I check in every now and again. Still beats having to do this manually. And I don’t use external disks anymore, exactly because I’ve had issues with them being unreadable in the past.
As for frequency: I back up the database to the NAS every night, and back that up to the cloud once a week. Same with the music files. I do make enough changes (and add music continuously) that it would be very annoying to have to track down and redo things that are more than a week old.
I check it regularly and it has a notification system to let you know it fails.
Do you use BackBlaze B2?
Yes, that’s what it’s called! I set this up a while ago and didn’t even remember. You can also use Amazon or some other block storage (clone supports a number of them), but B2 is pretty cheap and works well in my experience.
Can you share how much you pay them? Is it monthly? With their pricing schedule for B2 I can’t figure out how much I would have to pay unless I actually start using them.
I’ll have to look it up. But I thought their pricing page and estimator were very useful: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
I don’t know how much I upload each month, but you just have to ballpark it to get an idea. My library is less than 300GB at this point, probably upload 10GB a month or so. It’s pretty small potatoes either way.