Offsite backups without the cloud bill, powered by the people you trust.
There's a moment every home server owner eventually has. You've got your photos, your projects, your family's digital life all safely stored on your own hardware, protected against a drive failure, running without a problem. And then you wonder: but what if something happens to the whole server? Natural disasters or horrible mishaps: a fire, a flood, a drop down the stairs mid-move, or a toddler lovingly pouring a juice box into the chassis. All your redundancy lives in one box, in one building.
The traditional answer is to rent space from a cloud storage company and pay them every month, forever, based on how much data you have. Which is a strange ending to the self-hosting story, isn't it? You built your own server to get away from renting your digital life from someone else, and then the industry tells you the only way to protect it is to start renting again.
We think there's a better answer, and it has been on our feature list since day one: Buddy Backups, the ability to back up your HexOS server to a friend's HexOS server. It's now entering early rollout, so it's time to talk about exactly what it is, how it works, and what to expect.
Buddy Backups is built on a simple premise. You probably already know someone you trust: a friend, a sibling, your parents. And that person's home is, conveniently, not your home. If they have a HexOS server too (or you help them set one up), their server can hold an encrypted copy of your most important folders. If disaster ever strikes your house, your data is safe at theirs.
No monthly per-terabyte bill. No terms of service that can change without warning. No mega-corporation that can lock your account, throttle you, or decide your data is suddenly against policy. Just an arrangement between two people who trust each other, the way keeping a spare house key with a neighbor has worked for generations.
And to be clear about the trust involved: your buddy holds your backup, but they can never read it. More on that below.
You ask. From the Command Deck, you send a backup request to your buddy using their email address, along with how much space you'd like to reserve on their server.
They accept, on their terms. Your buddy receives the request through HexOS notifications. To accept, they choose which of their servers will receive your backup, which storage pool it lands on, and they can adjust the storage limit up or down from what you asked for. Their server, their rules.
Your servers connect directly whenever possible. By default, the two servers connect directly to each other over a secure, encrypted, peer-to-peer link. If your network blocks direct connections (some ISPs do), traffic automatically falls back to a relay so your backups keep flowing. During the beta, relay access will be free for all users.
Your data gets backed up, fully encrypted. Your data is encrypted before it leaves your server and it stays encrypted on your buddy's server. It never exists in readable form on their machine, even for a moment. Your buddy can see how much space your backup is using, but never what's inside it.
Requests are one-directional, and nobody has to back up in return. If you and a friend want to back up to each other, you each send a request and that's all it takes. If your parents just want to host your backup and never send one back, that works too. You decide what arrangement makes sense; HexOS just makes it easy.
You're also not limited to a single buddy. At launch you can back up to multiple buddies and host backups for multiple buddies, so you can spread your protection (and your generosity) however you like. You control the schedule, too: each backup can be set to run daily or weekly, on the day of the week and time of day you choose. So if you're running backups with several people, you can spread them out so they're not all competing for the same overnight window.
Hosting a backup should never mean giving up control. The recipient of a backup can set and adjust how much space is reserved for each buddy, see how much of it is in use, and end a backup arrangement at any time, for any reason. Storage stays under the owner's control, always.
The same is true in reverse, of course: the person holding your backup can stop holding it whenever they choose. Which is exactly why Buddy Backups is designed around real relationships. Back up to people you genuinely know and trust, not strangers.
If you own two or more HexOS servers (say, one at home and one at the office or a relative's house), you can create backups between them without any permission requests, since you're on both ends of the arrangement. Encryption is also optional in that case.
Your passphrase is yours. For your privacy and security, HexOS does not store a copy of your passphrase in our cloud. Nobody can unlock your data but you, and that includes us.
Danger: If you lose your passphrase, nobody can recover your data, including HexOS. Any backup you restore will stay locked forever. Keep your passphrase somewhere safe, and not only on the server being backed up.
Bandwidth controls are built in. Backup traffic won't take over your connection. You can set a rate limit yourself, or choose Smart and let HexOS handle it: the system measures your connection's throughput and caps backup traffic at half the maximum, so your streaming, gaming, and video calls keep running normally while your backups run. One clarification: this is a rate limit, not a data limit. Your full backup will still transfer regardless of the speed it runs at, so if your ISP imposes a data cap, watching it is still up to you.
Both sides need HexOS at launch. Sending and receiving backups will require each participant to own a HexOS license and run a HexOS server. Non-HexOS systems won't be attachable to the buddy network at launch.
If you want a comprehensive explanation of what's happening underneath, read How Buddy Backups works in our documentation for the full breakdown.
Buddy Backups is rolling out right now, starting with a select group of users for early testing. From there, we'll expand access in waves as we harden the feature, until it's ready to be marked complete and stable for everyone. Backup software has exactly one job (being there when you need it), so we're going to earn your trust the slow way.
Want in? Sign up here to participate in the beta. And in the meantime, start thinking about who your buddy is going to be. Bonus points if they owe you a favor.
The HexOS Team