When you host your own NextCloud instance, you are responsible for backing up your data, ideally following the 3-2-1 rule. The 3-2-1 rule states that you should always have three copies of your data, two copies locally which are on separate devices and 1 copy off-site. Many users using a RAID array or distributed file system such as NFS or ZFS mistakenly believe they don’t need a backup. In fact that couldn’t be further from the truth, because RAID is not backup. Even though RAID can usually save you when one or two drives fail in your array, it cannot prevent data loss from some calamities, such as a failed RAID controller or a natural disaster.
One of the easiest ways you can back up NextCloud to an off-site location is by using an object storage service, such as Amazon S3 or BackBlaze B2. Both services provide a command line interface that supports a rsync-like sync command which can incrementally backup your data to cloud storage.
Amazon S3 vs BackBlaze B2 for Backup Storage
Some of the benefits of using an object storage service for offsite backup include:
- Reliability: Amazon S3 is engineered for 99.999999999% durability, BackBlaze B2 99.999999% durability. The object storage service’s infrastructure is designed with multiple redundancies, making it highly unlikely for you to lose your backups.
- Data Life Cycle Management: Both Amazon S3 and BackBlaze B2 allow you to specify after how many days should be purged from the system, depending on your retention requirements and how much storage costs you are willing to incur. S3 also has multiple classes of storage, from Standard, infrequent access (IA) to Glacier, allowing you to manage your costs by archiving older data to more inexpensive storage.
- Retrieve Your Data by Physical Disk: If you have a large volume of data that would take days or months to download over your Internet connection, BackBlaze (Data by Mail) or Amazon (AWS Import/Export Disk) will ship you a hard drive with your data for a fee. Should you ever be in a disaster recovery scenario where you need to rebuild your NextCloud users’ data directories, this service could be a lifesaver.
So why would you choose Amazon S3 versus BackBlaze B2? Amazon S3 is a much more mature service available across Amazon’s regions worldwide, whereas B2 storage is solely located in the BackBlaze datacenters in Sacramento, CA. Here are some of the other differences:
| Amazon S3 | BackBlaze B2 | |
| Regions | Worldwide | Sacramento, CA |
| Durability | 99.999999999% (11 nines) | 99.999999% (9 nines) |
| Single File Size Limit | Unlimited | 10 TB |
| Encryption | Server-Side and Client-Side | Client-Side |
| Command Line Interface | AWS CLI or s3cmd | B2 Command Line Tool |
| Physical Disk Retrieval | $80.00 + $2.49/data loading hour + return shipping (if outside US) | $99 up to 128 GB (Flash Drive) $189 up to 4 TB (Hard Drive) |
| Upload (Ingress) Pricing | Free | Free |
| Download (Egress) Pricing | $0.05 – $0.09/GB | $0.02/GB |
| API Calls | $0.005/1,000 requests | $0.004/1,000 requests |
| Storage Pricing | $0.021 – $0.023/GB/month | $0.005/GB/month |
For backup, most of the costs you incur will be for storage. You might not need to download the data for months, or even years, so choosing the storage service with the most favorable monthly storage pricing is vital.
As you can see, BackBlaze B2 is 76% less costly to store the data month-over-month. You can mitigate some of the Amazon S3 storage costs by switching to a lower storage tier, such as Amazon Glacier, but data retrieval may be delayed by 3 to 12 hours, and you must pay a retrieval fee, in addition to the egress and per-request rates.
The main upside of Amazon S3 is their geographically distributed locations, which will result in lower latency to your NextCloud server especially if you are located outside of the US. Backup times may be substantially quicker, especially if your users add a large volume of data regularly. Don’t forget Amazon S3 also supports server-side-encryption, which means that data can be automatically encrypted at-rest, and transparently decrypted when you download it. With BackBlaze B2, you can employ client-side-encryption to protect your data from prying eyes.
Regardless of which option you choose, it’s imperative to have a backup solution for your NextCloud instance. We have prepared two shell scripts for backing up NextCloud that you can download and use with Amazon S3 or BackBlaze B2 respectively. The script can be scheduled as a cron job for daily or weekly backups.
Amazon S3 Backup Script for NextCloud
This script creates an incremental backup of your NextCloud instance to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a highly redundant block storage service with versioning and lifecycle management features.
Requirements
- NextCloud 11 or 12 running on Ubuntu 16.04+
- Amazon AWS Account and IAM User with AmazonS3FullAccess privilege
- Python 2.x and Python PIP –
sudo apt-get install python && wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py && sudo python get-pip.py - s3cmd installed from PyPI –
sudo pip install s3cmd
BackBlaze B2 Backup Script for NextCloud
This script creates an incremental backup of your NextCloud instance at BackBlaze’s off-site location.
BackBlaze B2 is an object storage service that is much less expensive than using Amazon S3 for the same purpose, with similar versioning and lifecycle management features.
Uploads are free, and storage costs only $0.005/GB/month compared to S3’s $0.022/GB/month.
Requirements
- NextCloud 11 or 12 running on Ubuntu 16.04+
- BackBlaze B2 account (10 GB Free) – Create one at https://www.backblaze.com/b2/sign-up.html
- Python 3.x and Python PIP –
sudo apt-get install python3 && wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py && sudo python3 get-pip.py - BackBlaze B2 CLI installed from PyPI –
sudo pip install b2
Instructions
1. Insert the following line in your NextCloud config.php file above the ); to move the cache above each user’s data directory. If /media/external/CloudDATA is not your data directory, substitute the relevant directory prior to /cache.
'cache_path' => '/media/external/CloudDATA/cache',
2. Create a bucket and obtain your Account ID and Application Key from your B2 account.
3. Authenticate your CLI using the b2 authorize_account command.
4. Save this script to a safe directory such as /srv/backupToB2.sh and make it executable with the following command.
sudo chmod +x backupToB2.sh
5. This script must be run as root. To run a backup now:
sudo ./backupToB2.sh
6. Set up a cron job to run this backup on a predefined schedule (optional).
sudo crontab -u root -e
Add the following line to the crontab to conduct a weekly backup every Saturday at 2:00am.
0 2 * * sat root sh /srv/backupToB2.sh > /srv/backupToB2.log
Save, quit and check that the crontab has been installed using the following command.
sudo crontab -u root -l
