My entire backup setup costs $70: one HDD and two rsync commands
Most popular backup solutions come with a hefty price tag and a complicated setup: a NAS packed with multiple drives plus a cloud subscription for extra storage. There's nothing wrong with that approach, but it's not the easiest way to do things, and it costs more than it has to.
The author of this XDA Developers piece has a radically simpler strategy. His entire backup system is a portable hard drive that costs under $70 and two rsync commands running on a schedule. Together they satisfy the 3-2-1 rule: the working copy, another local copy on the external drive, and an offsite copy sitting on a rented storage VPS. The whole setup has no GUI, no specialized software, and no cloud subscription.
This configuration has been running for several years, and the author has successfully restored from it twice. Backups don't have to be that complicated. The entire setup is a few lines of plain text, yet it's just as effective as an advanced backup suite.
A portable HDD is a great choice for a local copy, and it costs way less than a few months of cloud storage. A 1TB portable drive is easy to find for around $70. The author picked his up for about half that, but that was before the recent drive shortage caused by AI's popularity. If that's more than you'd like to spend, an old laptop drive in a cheap USB 3.0 enclosure is basically the same product. Even a slow 5400 RPM disk works fine for daily backups.
Everything worth backing up lives in a single folder. Everything else, including the OS and installed apps, is replaceable. The first command sends that directory of important files over to the portable hard drive. The second command syncs the same data to the remote VPS, providing the offsite copy. Restoring is just running rsync in reverse.
The author's point is that backups don't need to be complex. The simplicity of this scheme is its greatest strength, and its reliability has been proven by real-world restores. If you're tired of juggling NAS configurations and cloud subscriptions, a $70 drive and two commands might be all you need.
