Interesting, but that’s the price of a new drive every year, and 5TB would be the bare minimum I’d want. That probably makes sense in a professional setting, but it’s not cost effective for me as an individual.
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you can also use restic with your own storage solutions. ssh/ftp come to mind. or even a locally attached disk. all works. you dont have to use s3 object store.
but you store those disks in a different building from your own then right?
No, rsync only checks file integrity if you use the --checksum param. If not, it just checks file size and date. But tbf, this is almost the same for all backup solutions unless a checksum check is made
That’s my point. No one will want to learn Linux, and then a particular command line tool, just to dig through my files. But if they want to see the images from our trip to Mexico in 2019, and all they need to do is mount the folder 2019/03/mexico, that’s pretty accessible.
I’ve also had the issue where I encrypted a drive for my personal use, and didn’t need it for 5+ years. And then I tried to open it and realized I’d lost the password. I’m not saving financial or otherwise sensitive data, so the risk of locking myself out is greater than the risk of ‘unauthorized access’. Particularly since the drives will be air-gapped most of the time. If someone is inside my house, I have bigger problems than protecting my RAW files.
I already make books and post some of the best images to our social feeds.
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Is there a tool that doesn’t impose encryption? In my use case that will cause more problems than it solves.
you have a password manager? that has a password you are using probably daily? store your backup keys in that one?
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Yes. But as the main tech support person for my family, I know better than to trust my family members to figure that out if something should happen to me.
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Teach them about it. they should be using password managers too and you can make it easy for them (scripts/documentation/teaching them/teaching a friend) how to handle those those things. You will need to teach your loved ones anyway where to find your passwords and stuff so they can cancel things which are no longer needed. given how digital our lives are it is no longer just where to find the important printed out paper things.
Also dont worry as someone said before nobody wants too get into our backups for our photos anyway.
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Of course, the problem with that is that you either a) must have comparable duplicate hardware to restore to, or b) you have to blow away your source material on your main system so you can restore to it.
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I answered that part already.
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Ok. I responded before I finished reading the thread. It is still something people have to consider.
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BTW: you want to know what the most cost effective per TB price is for backups?
actually tape still 
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At scale yes. For individuals it’s off limits(without cloud solutions) since you need a 4500€ tape drive 
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It depends on how much of a data hoarder you are
At some point you reach the Fedex internet speed level. (as in “it is faster to ship locally copied disks than trying to transfer it over the internet”)
Also older LTO standards have reasonably priced drives.
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hey @plantarum I’m reading this thread late and I wanted to share a blog article about my photography workflow and I briefly describe my backup strategy in the section “Protecting memories”.
I strongly suggest restic for backups because it’s very fast and versatile.
Couple of things I want to share.
My main workstation has 3 Nmve ssd for a total of 1+2+2=5Tb that are in a LVM. I prefer to manage my collection locally just because it’s super fast and I do not have to deal with remote images.
I use rsync to have a 1-1 copy of my main drive on a more slower hdd so that if I need to revert or access it easily, I can just mount the drive.
I have other backups on my NAS and spare hard drives.
With that said, no matter what you chose, my strong advice is to test your backups. What i mean by that is after you find a backup strategy, try to simulate a failure.
Imagine you want to recover the entire backup, a folder, and understand how to do it. In my case, I documented everything in a README file that explains how to recover photos.
This is also in case one of my relatives wants to access my archive in…ehm…the worst-case scenario 
Wow, life on the edge!
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You don’t need rsync for that, pretty much all modern back solution support random, immediate access. Eg you can mount both restic and borgbackup.
rsync is a nice tool, but it has little to do with backups. As @darix said, trying to make rsync a backup system has a lot of pitfalls and does not make sense in this day and age.
Sure, in borgbackup it is --encryption none.
Regarding encryption: I use Borg which can encryt but its optional. I have a single Borgmatic config with two backup destinations, one is a hetzner box with encryption, the other a local external HDD which is unencrypted.
My reasoning is the same as yours. I do want the remote backup to be encrypted but for the external HDD, I consider the risk of me forgetting the password as higher than the risk of someone stealing it.
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YOLO 
Thank you for your reply, which allows me to clarify something. The only reason I still use rsync is laziness
In fact, it is still part of my backup scripts, but not for long, as I am currently reviewing them.
I used it before I knew about restic.
The first few times I used restic, I had trouble mounting the backups.
To be on the safe side, I always preferred to have a 1-1 copy with rsync, but today, as you point out, it is redundant and useless.
Today, restic is essential for me; I wouldn’t know how to do without it.
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