ServerCrate gives you a private offsite backup server - a dedicated encrypted vault in Los Angeles - accessible via Restic over SFTP. You get the security and isolation of a dedicated backup server without managing hardware, RAID arrays, or remote infrastructure.
Local backups protect against drive failure, accidental deletion, and software corruption. They don't protect against events that affect your entire physical location: fire, flooding, theft, power surge damage, or a building-level disaster.
The 3-2-1 backup rule - three copies, two media types, one offsite - has been the gold standard for data protection for decades. The "one offsite" component is the most commonly skipped, because setting up remote infrastructure is genuinely painful.
ServerCrate makes the offsite component straightforward: create an account, get a vault connection string, point Restic at it, and your data is encrypted and stored in a physically separate location. No servers to provision, no storage to manage, no RAID to monitor.
Each ServerCrate account gets a dedicated private vault - a ZFS dataset on our infrastructure in Los Angeles, accessible via SFTP. Your vault has its own storage quota, its own SFTP port, and is completely isolated from other users' vaults.
You connect Restic to your vault using the connection string from your portal. Restic handles all encryption on your machine before transmitting data. ServerCrate stores only the encrypted chunks - we cannot read your backups.
Silent data corruption (bit rot) is a real problem in long-term storage. A backup that's unreadable when you need it is worse than no backup - you find out at the worst possible time.
ServerCrate uses ZFS for all vault storage. ZFS maintains checksums of every block and verifies them on every read. If a block has been corrupted, ZFS detects it immediately and can often recover from redundant copies. Your Restic repository stays intact over its entire lifetime.
No egress fees on any plan. Restore your data as many times as you need.
Not all remote storage is a good offsite backup server. The right solution needs several things working together: physical separation from your primary data, client-side encryption with a key you control, data integrity checking for long-term storage, reliable uptime when backup jobs run, and flat pricing that doesn't penalize restore testing.
ServerCrate is built to satisfy all of these: geographically separate (Los Angeles), zero-knowledge client-side encryption via Restic, ZFS checksumming for data integrity, infrastructure-grade uptime, and flat pricing with no egress fees on any plan.
Restic uses AES-256 encryption with a key derived from your password using scrypt. Before any data is transmitted to ServerCrate, Restic chunks, deduplicates, and encrypts it locally. ServerCrate receives and stores only encrypted chunks - without your password, the stored data is mathematically unreadable, not just policy-protected.
After the first backup, subsequent runs are fast because Restic deduplicates at the chunk level. Only data that has actually changed since the last snapshot is transferred. For most setups, daily incremental backups complete in minutes.
Silent data corruption is a real problem in long-term storage. A backup repository that has accumulated undetected corruption is unrestorable exactly when you need it. ServerCrate uses ZFS for all vault storage. ZFS maintains cryptographic checksums of every block and verifies them on every read. If a block has been corrupted, ZFS detects it immediately. Your Restic repository stays intact and verifiable over its entire lifetime.
You can verify this at any time by running restic check against your vault. Restic reads and verifies every pack file. See the restore guide for full verification commands.
restic check monthly to verify repository integrity. Run a real file restore to a temporary location quarterly using restic restore latest --target /tmp/test-restore --include /path/to/file. ServerCrate has no egress fees so restore testing costs nothing extra.Free plan, no credit card, vault ready in seconds after signup.