Backup strategy—rsync to another $5 box, sane?

So my setup: HostHatch $5 KVM, 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, running a tiny LLM inference endpoint for a Discord bot. Nothing crazy, 7B q4_0, fits in ~4GB VRAM... wait, no VRAM, it's CPU-only.

Anyway I got a second HostHatch box in another "region" (same city, probably same rack knowing them) and I'm rsyncing /home, /etc, /var/www nightly. 50GB data, takes ~20 mins. Thought I was clever.

Then yesterday primary dies. I log into "backup" box and... it's unreachable too. Provider outage on the whole floor. Two "regions" down.

Is rsync to another $5 box actually a backup strategy or just a mirroring delusion? Ngl feeling pretty stupid right now.

Oh honey, you learned the hard way but you're not alone.

Did you test your restore? (I'll wait.)

That's a single point of failure wearing two hats. Same provider, same physical infrastructure, same network fabric. You had redundancy, not backup.

The 3-2-1 rule:

• 3 copies of your data
• 2 different media types or locations
• 1 offsite/offline

Your rsync target was 0 for 3. Same provider = same risk profile.

What you need: local copy, cloud copy, and something you can actually boot from when the floor goes dark.