When you're backing up homelab, your backup needs a backup. As I've been working my way through all the different cloud services I'm paying for, one thing I wanted to do was take a tiny bit of those savings and put them toward a cloud-based backup of my servers, not just the main Unraid box, but all the little machines scattered around my home office— the home lab, if you will. The plan is simple: everything backs up to the Unraid server, and then Unraid backs up to the cloud. Personal documents, photos, videos, audiobooks, ebooks, and anything else that would be a pain or impossible to replace. Backblaze Personal looked like the best option at $15 a month for unlimited data on one computer. The catch? It's a Windows and Mac product, and I'm running Linux.
Why Backblaze Personal on a NAS Is Weird
Backblaze Personal isn't designed for this. It's meant for your laptop or desktop, not a headless server with 35TB of media. But the pricing is hard to beat if you can make it work. The trick is running the Windows client inside a Wine container using the backblaze-personal-wine-container project by JonathanTreffler. You get a virtual display streamed to your browser through noVNC, and the Backblaze client thinks it's running on a normal Windows machine. No VM, no Windows license, just Wine doing its thing. It's janky in the best possible way. Create some windows drives and assign existing directories to them and you are now backing up your "windows" computer.
JonathanTreffler
Deciding What Actually Needs Backing Up
The first real decision was figuring out what to back up. I've got over 35TB of stuff on the server, but most of it is replaceable— "Linux ISOs" and media files that I could re-download if I had to. What matters is the irreplaceable stuff: 2.3TB of photos in Immich, home videos, voice memos, archived websites, YouTube downloads, podcasts I produced over the years, music I ripped when I was in my teens, audiobooks, ebooks, and all the Docker configs and databases that make everything actually work. Backblaze Personal is priced for personal files, not a media vault, so I had to be selective. If I can get it "off the back of an Internet truck,” it doesn't need cloud backup; it can be replaced later. My kids’ first steps, wedding photos, and other irreplaceable memories— I need to keep them safe.
The Database Backup Problem
Backing up live database files is a bad idea. You'll snapshot them mid-write and end up with corrupted backups. The fix was a nightly dump script that runs through Unraid's User Scripts plugin before Backblaze picks anything up. I'm dumping PostgreSQL databases for Authentik and Immich, plus MariaDB, into compressed SQL files. Finding the right connection method for each database was its own adventure. Authentik's PostgreSQL user isn't postgres; it's authentik. The MariaDB LSIO image uses Unix socket auth for root instead of password auth. You work through it, you document it, and you are good.
The Read-Only Mount Mistake
I mounted the backup volumes as read-only because it seemed like a safe default. Then Backblaze silently failed to back anything up. The client tries to create a .bzvol metadata directory at the root of each drive, and it can't do that on a read-only mount. Dropping the :ro flags fixed it immediately. It's a good reminder that "safe defaults" aren't always compatible with how software actually behaves.
Final Thoughts
After working through all the quirks, I've got 1.4 million files and about 2.5TB queued for backup. Database dumps run nightly and rotate automatically. The container throws a permission warning on startup, but that's just a Wine thing; the green checkmark in the Backblaze client is what matters. The whole setup is a reminder that on a homelab you are responsible for everything, until you put it in the cloud. Remember, "The Cloud is just someone else's computer.” If you're running a similar setup and want to know more about keeping your self-hosted stuff resilient, I've also written about fixing a corrupted Plex database and moving from Plex to Jellyfin and some solutions on documenting your homelab.
What are you using in your homelab for offside backup? Join my site for free and leave a comment below.
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