I have limited my usecases for selfhosting and thrown money at the problem. The usecases are:

• image hosting and sharing with the family
• backups of our family computers
• digital file hosting
• media hosting

The last one is expendable. The first three are backed up into the cloud. I use a Synology, thus throwing money at the problem. Their cloud backup just works.

Edit: use cases I do not self host are a mail server for example. The stress outweighs the 12€/year I pay for the service.

It doesn't have to be hard - you just need to think methodically through each of your services and assess the cost of creating/storing the backup strategy you want versus the cost (in time, effort, inconvenience, etc) if you had to rebuild it from scratch.

For me, that means my photo and video library (currently Immich) and my digital records (Paperless) are backed up using a 2N+C strategy: a copy on each of 2 NASes locally, and another copy stored in the cloud.

Ditto for backups of my important homelab data. I have some important services (like Home Assistant, Node-RED, etc) that push their configs into a personal Gitlab instance each time there's a change. So, I simply back that Gitlab instance up using the same strategy. It's mainly raw text in files and a small database of git metadata, so it all compresses really nicely.

For other services/data that I'm less attached to, I only backup the metadata.

Say, for example, I'm hosting a media library that might replace my personal use of services that rhyme with "GetDicks" and "Slime Video". I won't necessarily backup the media files themselves - that would take way more space than I'm prepared to pay for. But I do backup the databases for that service that tells me what media files I had, and even the exact name of the media files when I "found" them.

In a total loss of all local data, even though the inconvenience factor would be quite high, the cost of storing backups would far outweigh that. Using the metadata I do backup, I could theoretically just set about rebuilding the media library from there. If I were hosting something like that, that is...

Snapshots are the first line of defense for recovery from software errors. For hardware use ZFS raid.

That still isn't a proper backup. Have a separate backup that can not easily be destroyed.

@iso@lemy.lol I think we need to accept that unless self-hosting is your full time job, things can and will break. At some point you have to accept it and let it go.

Finally I know when I die, my spouse won't take care of my homelab and servers, all of it will go to the recycler.