August 2026 · 8 min
Three copies, two media, one off-site — on a hobby budget that means: the NAS mirror, a USB drive in a drawer, and an encrypted bucket abroad. The USB drive rotates monthly; the bucket syncs nightly with object lock so ransomware can't rewrite history.
The unglamorous part is testing. Every quarter I pick a random folder and restore it to a scratch directory, then diff. Twice this caught silent permission drift that would have made a real restore painful. Backups you never test are just wishes with electricity.