I’m aware that the proper way to handle backups for a NAS is to have a second TrueNAS machine on preferably a different continental plate or at least a different city, and sending ZFS snapshots to it.

But well I don’t exactly have a second flat nor the budget for a second NAS and cloud storage is a continuous expense that I’d rather not deal with. So I was thinking I’d just backup the ~1.3TB of not re-downloadable data on a bunch of USB hard drives but then I noticed how similar the prices for 2TB m.2 SSDs and for 2TB USB hard drives are.

So my plan is:

• Get 1 Icy Dock NVMe m.2 enclosure.
• Get 3 of the cheapest brand name 2TB m.2 NVMe SSDs.
• Setup the SSDs with BTRFS and LUKS.
• Backup my ~1.3TB of important data to each of the SSDs. Put each SSD into a sturdy box give one to my parents, one to a good friend that lives many hours away and put one on a shelf in my room. The drive at my friends place would give me at least some of my data back in case the entire city was leveled by a Kaiju.
• I’d rsync my NAS to the drive at home every week to protect against the NAS kicking the bucket
• Since I visit my parents frequently I could just occasionally swap out their drive with mine to keep that backup somewhat up to date. Which gives me protection from a house fire. The drive at my friends place I should probably be able to update like every year or two. Due to LUKS I wouldn’t have to worry about the drives being stolen and with BTRFS I could run a scrub when I get one of the drives that haven’t been update in a while to see if the backup was corrupted. The scrubs are a reason why I think SSDs would be better than HDDs because then the scrubs would be fast. I’m choosing BTRFS over ZFS for the external drives here because then I can just read the backup drives from any normal Linux machine and don’t need to setup ZFS on Linux first.

So how dumb is that plan? Am I better of doing the same thing with HDDs instead?