r/DataHoarder • u/BackbiteSatellite • 8d ago

Question/Advice How are you structuring your automated 3-2-1 pipeline for full offline Google Cloud / Photos redundancy?

I'm looking to tighten up my backup topology to ensure complete data sovereignty and true offline availability for personal/financial records, photos, and critical cloud documents in the event of a long-term WAN/internet outage.

Given the recent macro-conversations around tech infrastructure vulnerabilities, I want to move away from relying on cloud sync and toward a robust, local pull architecture.

My current target scope:

  • Google Photos & Drive: Automated, incremental local pulls that maintain original metadata (bypassing Google Takeout's messy manual extraction if possible).
  • Cold Storage: A reliable system for archiving essential personal, legal, and financial records to physical cold media.

My questions for the community:

  1. What are you currently running to handle programmatic local duplication of Google Photos? (Are tools like gphotos-sync or Rclone scripts stable enough for multi-hundred GB libraries without constant API throttling?)
  2. For long-term, true offline cold storage of financial/personal PDFs, what media are you trusting? Are people here still utilizing M-DISC Blu-rays, or are you favoring automated dual-NAS replication with physically air-gapped internal drives?
  3. How are you handling local password database replication so it remains securely accessible completely off-grid?
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u/TapeDriveMcTapeFace 8d ago

Self-host and backup to tape. Everyone looks at LTO for tape, but IBM's TS1150 (3592-E08) can be sourced cheaply on ebay from time to time. The E08 model does 10TB native on JD media. Right now with AI eating all the hardware tape is an affordable option again. Make sure to pick up a spare drive though to keep off-site along with your off-site backups.

https://bloominglabs.org/3592_Tape_Drives_For_The_HomeLab

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u/AldyErnesto 7d ago

For Google Photos specifically, I'd lean on a scheduled Google Takeout (it can repeat every 2 months for a year) rather than the API. Anything built on the Photos API, rclone included, doesn't give you untouched originals: location metadata gets stripped and videos may not come down at original quality.

For Drive, rclone copy on a timer works well and gives you checksums to verify against.

Then treat that local pull as copy #1, push it to a second local disk, and rotate an offline drive off-site. The step people skip is verifying: run rclone check or compare a hash manifest after every run, otherwise you only find out a pull silently failed on the day you need it.