Backup hosting
Answer
Offsite backup hosting gives you a remote target for encrypted backups, in a different jurisdiction from your primary infrastructure. Incognito VPS storage servers provide 4 to 32 TB of RAID-10 capacity with unmetered transfer from $16 per month, reachable over SSH, SFTP or rclone.
| Scenario | Minimum |
|---|---|
| Personal | 4 TB |
| Small business | 8 TB |
| Media archive | 16 TB |
| Large archive | 32 TB |
Jurisdictional separation is the point
A backup in the same building as the primary protects against disk failure. A backup in the same jurisdiction protects against disk failure and fire. A backup in a different jurisdiction protects against disk failure, fire, and a legal event that reaches everything you own in one country at once.
The last category is the one people skip, and it is the one that ends businesses. If your primary is in Frankfurt, put the backup in Reykjavík or Zürich rather than Berlin.
Encrypt before it leaves
Restic and Borg both encrypt client-side with a key you hold, which means the data arriving on our disks is opaque to us by construction. That is the correct arrangement and we would rather you use it than trust us.
Both do content-addressed deduplication, so incremental backups transfer only what changed. Both support append-only repository modes, which is the specific defence against a compromised primary encrypting your backups too — a ransomware operator with your credentials still cannot delete history.
Practical setup
SSH key access, an unprivileged user per repository, and a nightly systemd timer. restic backup /data --repo sftp:user@host:/repo is most of it. Set --append-only on the server side for the ransomware case.
Unmetered transfer means the initial seed of several terabytes costs nothing beyond the time, and restores cost nothing at all — which is the moment when metered providers become expensive at exactly the wrong time.
Frequently asked questions
01 Can you read my backups?
Not if you use restic or Borg, which encrypt client-side with a key you hold. What arrives on our disks is ciphertext. That is the arrangement we recommend precisely because it does not require trusting us.
02 Is restore traffic charged?
No. Transfer is unmetered on all storage plans in both directions. Restoring 8 TB costs nothing, which is the point — metered providers get expensive exactly when you are already having a bad day.
03 Which location for backups?
Any jurisdiction different from your primary. Iceland and Switzerland are the usual choices for legal separation; Bulgaria if cost is the deciding factor.
04 Do you support append-only repositories?
Yes. Configure the SSH key with restic or Borg append-only mode and a compromised primary cannot delete backup history — the specific defence against ransomware that goes after your backups.
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