About 7 years ago there was an Amazon sale ($300) on Lenovo TS140 towers with the low-powered Xeon chip and ECC RAM and 4 drive bays. Ever since I've been unable to find a similar price point for the same quality, but wanted a backup server. I recently got a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB model) and external USB hard drive (8TB) mirrored with a s3backer volume on backblaze B2 for about $300 total, and as a backup server it's fast enough (performance limited by the Internet speed to B2) and probably idles at 10W-15W.
One of the nice benefits of ZFS native encryption + s3backer is that if I had a total outage locally and needed to recover some files quickly I could mount the s3backer-based zpool from any machine, decrypt the dataset, and pull the individual files out of a filesystem. It's also a weird situation with cloud providers that convenient network-attached block storage is ~10X the price of object storage at the moment but performance can be similar using s3backer.
Appreciate the insights on your S3 backup solution.
I will mention that I am one of those folks with a TS140. Love that it's a power sipper. I maxed out the processor and memory, as well as loading it up with two 10 TB rust disks and two 512 GB SSDs.
One of the nice benefits of ZFS native encryption + s3backer is that if I had a total outage locally and needed to recover some files quickly I could mount the s3backer-based zpool from any machine, decrypt the dataset, and pull the individual files out of a filesystem. It's also a weird situation with cloud providers that convenient network-attached block storage is ~10X the price of object storage at the moment but performance can be similar using s3backer.