Git handles your code. Time Machine handles your Mac. But what about your Docker volumes, local databases, SSH keys, dotfiles, side project assets, and the 47 GB of conference talk recordings you swear you will organize someday?
Most developers have a fragile backup story. Some have no story at all. Here are five options that cover the spectrum from “quick portable drive” to “enterprise-grade NAS with automated snapshots.”
Best Overall: Synology DS224+
Price: ~$300 (diskless) | Type: 2-bay NAS
The Synology DS224+ is the developer’s Swiss Army knife for storage. Drop in two drives, set up RAID 1 for redundancy, and you have a local backup target that runs 24/7 without tying up your workstation.
What makes it developer-friendly is DSM, Synology’s operating system. It runs Docker containers natively, so you can host Gitea, Nextcloud, or a local registry alongside your backups. Hyper Backup handles scheduled snapshots with versioning and optional encryption. Active Backup for Business can pull full images from your Mac or Linux box on a schedule.
The Intel Celeron J4125 is not going to win benchmark races, but it handles RAID rebuilds and incremental backups without breaking a sweat. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports with link aggregation give you about 200 MB/s sustained writes on a wired network.
Pair it with two Seagate IronWolf 4TB NAS drives for roughly $200 more, and you have a proper home server for under $500.
Best Portable: Samsung T7 Shield 2TB
Price: ~$160 | Type: External SSD
The Samsung T7 Shield is the drive you toss in your bag for offsite rotation. IP65 rated for dust and water resistance, which matters more than you think when it lives in a backpack next to a water bottle.
Transfer speeds hit 1,050 MB/s over USB 3.2 Gen 2, so cloning a 500 GB drive takes around eight minutes. AES 256-bit hardware encryption keeps things locked if the drive walks away.
The workflow: run rsync or restic to the T7 Shield weekly, then store it somewhere that is not your house. If your apartment floods and takes out the NAS, you have a cold backup at the office or a friend’s place. Old-school, but it works.
Best Budget: WD My Passport 5TB
Price: ~$130 | Type: Portable HDD
The WD My Passport 5TB is not fast and it is not glamorous. What it is: 5 TB of reliable spinning storage for the price of a nice dinner. For archival backups — old projects, raw assets, VM images — write speed matters less than capacity.
USB 3.0 tops out around 130 MB/s, which is fine for overnight rsync jobs. WD’s built-in password protection adds a layer of security, though most developers will prefer gpg or LUKS encryption anyway.
Keep one at home and one at work. Rotate monthly. This is the cheapest path to a genuine 3-2-1 backup strategy.
Best Cloud: Backblaze B2
Price: $6/TB/month | Type: Cloud object storage
Backblaze B2 is the developer’s cloud backup that does not require a second mortgage. At $6 per terabyte per month with no minimum retention fees, it undercuts S3 by roughly 75%.
The S3-compatible API means every tool you already know — rclone, restic, duplicity, kopia — works out of the box. Set up a restic repository on B2 with deduplication and encryption, point a cron job at it, and forget about it until you need a restore.
Free egress through Cloudflare via the Bandwidth Alliance eliminates the “I can back up to the cloud but cannot afford to restore” problem that plagues AWS Glacier workflows. If you ever need to pull 500 GB in a hurry, you will not be penalized for it.
Best Open Source Tool: restic
Price: Free | Type: Backup software
restic is the git of backup tools. It handles deduplication, encryption, and incremental snapshots, and it runs everywhere — Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD.
Point it at a local drive, SFTP server, S3 bucket, Backblaze B2, or any combination. Each backup is a snapshot you can browse and restore individually. Deduplication is content-defined chunking, so moving a file between directories does not double your storage usage.
A basic setup takes five minutes:
# Initialize a repository
restic init --repo /mnt/backup/restic-repo
# Back up your home directory
restic backup ~/Projects ~/dotfiles ~/.ssh
# Browse snapshots
restic snapshots
# Restore a specific snapshot
restic restore latest --target /tmp/restorePair restic with a Synology NAS for local snapshots and Backblaze B2 for offsite, and you have a proper 3-2-1 strategy for under $10/month in cloud costs.
The 3-2-1 Rule
Every backup guide mentions it because it works: three copies of your data, on two different media types, with one copy offsite. The setups above make this practical:
- Copy 1: Your working machine
- Copy 2: Synology NAS on your local network (or a WD My Passport)
- Copy 3: Backblaze B2 or a Samsung T7 Shield stored elsewhere
The best backup strategy is the one you actually run. Automate it, verify it occasionally with a test restore, and stop thinking about it.