Droolio

Do ignore me then, I assumed you might know the reference and only I mean’t it in good humour. :) (Without spoiling anything - in the unlikely event you might some day watch it - Mr Milchick is a character that uses ‘big words’. Your choice of words struck a chord.) I will say though, you’re seriously missing out. The cinematography alone is brilliant and the acting exceptional.

As you were, Mr Milchick.

More than just a traditional VPN. @Galapagon@sh.itjust.works was concerned about security and it being always-on. Tailscale is an overlay network that links devices directly, deals with authentication, punching holes through NAT.

You’re limiting yourself somewhat if you’re not able to plug in multiple drives at the same time. Otherwise, I might suggest mergerfs for basic JBOD. You won’t be able to use a single ZFS to avoid bit rot - only detect it. SnapRAID - ideal for offline setups - would be the next step up if you could dedicate one of your drives to parity.

In your position, I’d do Duplicacy backups split/spanned over multiple backup drives (however you connect them).

It has a pretty cool Erasure Coding feature that protects individual chunks from bit rot and possibly even bad sectors, plus the whole database-less architecture makes it very robust. De-duplication, high levels of compress, and encryption. Plus you can keep historic snapshots, so you can avoid the risk of accidentally sync’ing ransomware over the top.

Edit: the CLI is free for personal use, and is source-available. Written in Go and extremely performant.

my dad and I both have hypervisors. Any suggestions on how to share backups without a vpn?

Just use Tailscale on the devices instead of VPN. Secure and no faffing around with port forwarding.

Multiple backups may be kept.

Nice work, but if I may suggest - it lacks hardlink support, so’s quite wasteful in terms of disk space - the number of ‘tags’ (snapshots) will be extremely limited.

At least two robust solutions that use rsync+hardlinks already exist: rsnapshot.org and dirvish.org (both written in perl). There’s definitely room for backup tools that produce plain copies, instead of packed chunk data like restic and Duplicacy, and a python or even bash-based tool might be nice, so keep at it.

However, I liken backup software to encryption - extreme care must be taken when rolling and using your own. Whatever tool you use, test test test the backups. :)

There’s no point doing anything fancy like that - wireguard over Tailscale is pretty pointless, as Tailscale is literally wireguard with NAT traversal and authentication bolted on. Unless you enable subnetting, it can’t get more secure than that.

And even if you do enable subnetting (which you might wanna do if you need access to absolutely everything), you can use Tailscale ACLs to keep tighter control - say, from specific (tagged) devices.

Won’t take that long before the enshittification is complete.