Droolio

More than just a traditional VPN. @[email protected] 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. :)

They’ve been audited twice:

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/privacy-audit/

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/security-audit-2024/ (PDF)

https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-claims-proven-true-again-in-court-180606/

Yes to crypto, via Bitpay.

Still using Private Internet Access (PIA).

Honestly, dunno why they’ve fallen out of fashion due to the FUD about being owned by an unsavoury parent company, but the most important matter to me is if they keep logs, which they don’t. One of the few VPN companies tested on this, in court, and in a recent audit. Plus still extremely cheap (if you go for 3yr+3mo).

Port forwarding works with with this docker NAS stack. Doesn’t use gluetun, but there’s a specialised docker-wireguard-pia container as part of the stack, with a script that handles port changes. Been flawless.

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