How often do you run backups on your system?
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Boils down to how much are you willing to lose? Personally I do weekly
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Nextcloud data daily, same for the docker configs. Less important/rarely changing data once per week. Automatic sync to NAS and online storage. Irregular and manual sync to an external disk.
7 daily backups, 4 weekly backups, "infinite" monthly backups retained (until I clean them up by hand).
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Timeshift creates a btrfs snapshot on each boot for me. And my server gets nightly borg backups.
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Just a friendly reminder that BTRFS snapshots are not backups.
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I run Borg nightly, backing up the majority of the data on my boot disk, incl docker volumes and config + a few extra folders.
Each individual archive is around 375gb, but because of the de-duplication and compression it's only ~600mb of new data each day taking around 3min to complete the backup.
Borgs de-duplication is honestly incredible. I keep 7 daily backups, 3 weekly, 11 monthly, then one for each year beyond that. The 21 historical backups I have right now RAW would be 10.98tb of data. After de-duplication and compression it only takes up 407.98gb on disk.
With that kind of space savings, I see no reason not to keep such frequent backups. Hell, the whole archive takes up less space than one copy of the original data.
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Daily backups here. Storage is cheap. Losing data is not.
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You're correct and probably the person you're responding to is treating one as an alternative as another.
However, theoretically filesystem snapshotting can be used to enable backups, because they permit for an instantaneous, consistent view of a filesystem. I don't know if there are backup systems that do this with btrfs today, but this would involve taking a snapshot and then having the backup system backing up the snapshot rather than the live view of the filesystem.
Otherwise, stuff like drive images and database files that are being written to while being backed up can just have a corrupted, inconsistent file in the backup.
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btrbk works that way essentially. Takes read-only snapshots on a schedule, and uses btrfs send/receive to create backups.
There's also snapraid-btrfs which uses snapshots to help minimise write hole issues with snapraid, by creating parity data from snapshots, rather than the raw filesystem.
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Backups???
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Yes. That's why I sync my important files to my nextcloud.
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Yep. Even if the data I'm backing up doesn't really change that often. Perhapas I should start to back up files from my laptop and workstation too. Nothing too important is stored only on those devices, but reinstalling and reconfiguring everything back is a bit of a chore.
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Using Kopia, backups are made multiple times per day to Google drive. Only changes are transferred.
Configurations are backed up once per week and manually, stored 4 weeks. Websites and NextCloud data is backed up every hour and stored for a year (although I'm doing this only 7 months now).
Kopia is magic, recommended!
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and uses btrfs send/receive to create backups.
I'm not familiar with that, but if it permits for faster identification of modified data since a given time than scanning a filesystem for modification times, which a filesystem could potentially do, that could also be a useful backup enabler, since now your scan-for-changes time doesn't need to be linear in the number of files in the filesystem. If you don't do that, your next best bet on Linux -- and this way would be filesystem-agnostic -- is gonna require something like having a daemon that runs and uses inotify to build some kind of on-disk index of modifications since the last backup, and a backup system that can understand that.
looks at btrfs-send(1) man page
Ah, yeah, it does do that. Well, the man page doesn't say what time it runs in, but I assume that it's better than linear in file count on the filesystem.
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Raid is a backup.
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Weekly full backup, nightly incremental
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Most backup software allow you to configure backup retention. I think I went with some pretty standard once per day for a week. After that they get deleted and it keeps just one per week of the older ones, for a month. And after a month it's down to monthly snapshots. I think that aligns well with what I need.
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That is what the B in RAID stands for.
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Depends on the system but weekly at least
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I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent?
Only you can answer that - what is your risk tolerance for data loss?
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Every hour, automatically
Never on my Laptop, because I'm too lazy to create a mechanism that detects when it's possible.
