What do you use for automated off-site backups when you don't trust the cloud?

Right then, bit of a paranoid one this. I'm with Hostinger (shameless ) and we've had customers lose data to "cloud" providers that turned out to be one guy with a Synology in a cupboard. So I get the skepticism.

My current setup:

• Primary: rsnapshot to a KnownHost box I actually trust
• Secondary: encrypted tarballs to my sister in New Zealand, rotated on USB drives
• Tertiary: a mate's basement server in Amsterdam, friend-of-friend arrangement

The USB rotation is proper elaborate. I post her a drive, she posts the old one back. Takes 3 weeks. The 3-2-1 rule with extra steps and international postage.

But I'm curious — what do you lot do when "just use S3" feels wrong? Peer-to-peer? Small providers you actually know? Something weirder?

My backup target has 99.997% uptime over 4 years. That's CloudCone in Los Angeles, single admin, publishes actual status page with real incidents. I rsync nightly, ZFS send weekly, test restore monthly. But the status page might. I monitor his status page FROM my monitoring. If my monitor can't reach his status page, I alert. If his status page says up but my monitor says down, I know which to trust. For second site I use a GreenCloudVPS VM in Singapore. The latency is terrible for restore but the geographic separation is the point. No friends. No USB. No trust. Just redundancy and verification.