How do you backup?
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
for my server I use proxmox backup server to an external HDD for my containers, and I back up media monthly to an encrypted cold drive.
For my desktop? I use a mix of syncthing (which goes to the server) and windows file history(if I logged into the windows partition) and I want to get timeshift working I just have so much data that it's hard to manage so currently I'll just shed some tears if my Linux system fails
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Backup? What?
Your car.
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
My conclusion after researching this a while ago is that the good options are Borg and Restic. Both give you incremental backups with cheap timewise snapshots. They are quite similar to each other, and I don't know of a compelling reason to pick one over the other.
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
rsync
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
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I've found that the easiest and most effective way to update is with an rsync cron job. It's super easy to setup (I had no prior experience with either rsync or cron and it took me 10 minutes) and to configure. The only drawback is that it doesn't create differential backups, but the full task takes less than a minute every day so I don't consider that a problem. But do note that I only backup my home folder, not the full system.
For reference, this is the full line I use:
sync -rau --delete --exclude-from='/home/<myusername>/.rsync-exclude' /home/<myusername> /mnt/Data/Safety/rsync-myhome".rsync-exclude" is a file that lists all files and directories I don't want to backup, such as temp or cache folders.
only drawback is that it doesn't create differential backups
This is a big drawback because even if you don't need to keep old versions of files, you could be replicating silent disk corruption to your backup.
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My conclusion after researching this a while ago is that the good options are Borg and Restic. Both give you incremental backups with cheap timewise snapshots. They are quite similar to each other, and I don't know of a compelling reason to pick one over the other.
As far as I know, by definition, at least restic is not incremental. It is a mix of full backup and incremental backup.
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
I want to say I'm glad you asked this and thank you for asking. In this day and age there are a lot of valid concerns for privacy and anonymity and the result is that people do not share how their system(s) work, not openly or very often. I'm still fairly new to Linux (3.5 years) and at times, I feel like I am doing everything wrong and that there is probably a better way. Posts like these help me learn about possible improvements or mistakes I might have made.
I previously used Vorta with Borgbackup locally, automatically backing up my Home (sans things like .cache and .mozilla) to a secondary internal drive every other day. I also would manually back up a smaller set of important documents (memes and porn #joke) to a USB flash drive, to keep on my person, which also would be copied across several cloud storage providers (dropbox, mega, proton), depending on how much space their free versions provided, with items removed according to how much I trusted the provider.
Then I built a new system. In the process of setting it all up, I had a few hiccups. It took longer than I expected to have a stable system. That was over a year ago (
stat /...Birth: 2024-02-05 04:20:53...) and I still haven't gotten around to setting up any backup system on it. I want to rethink my old solution and this post is useful for learning about the options available. It's also a reminder to get it done before it is too late. Where I live, tornado season in starting. I lost a lot in 2019 after my city had 4 tornados in one day. -
I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
Borg to a NAS.
500GB of that NAS is "special" so I then rsynx that to another Drive, of which is is duplicated again.
Same 500GB rsync'd to Cloud Server.
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I've found that the easiest and most effective way to update is with an rsync cron job. It's super easy to setup (I had no prior experience with either rsync or cron and it took me 10 minutes) and to configure. The only drawback is that it doesn't create differential backups, but the full task takes less than a minute every day so I don't consider that a problem. But do note that I only backup my home folder, not the full system.
For reference, this is the full line I use:
sync -rau --delete --exclude-from='/home/<myusername>/.rsync-exclude' /home/<myusername> /mnt/Data/Safety/rsync-myhome".rsync-exclude" is a file that lists all files and directories I don't want to backup, such as temp or cache folders.
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
I use BorgBackup with Vorta for a GUI, and I keep the 3-2-1 backup rule for important stuff (IE: 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 off-site.)
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
My kmymoney file goes on an old compact flash memory card.
My home directory (including that file), /etc, databases, and a few other things get backed up weekly on to a USB stick.
Media raid array is automatically backed up to a large drive in another computer each evening. (The raid5 array isn't that large. It was when I built it, but now I can buy a single drive that is nearly as large as the array...)
Pictures are backed up to Amazon's glacier deep freeze. I pay about $1/month to back up all of my pictures. I intend to put other important things there too but haven't gotten there yet.
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only drawback is that it doesn't create differential backups
This is a big drawback because even if you don't need to keep old versions of files, you could be replicating silent disk corruption to your backup.
Itâs not a drawback because rsync has supported incremental versioned backups for over a decade, you just have to use the --link-dest flag and add a couple lines of code around it for management.
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
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My KVM hosts use âvirsh backup beginâ to make full backups nightly.
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All machines, including the KVM hosts and laptops, use rsync with --link-dest to create daily incremental versioned backups on my main backup server.
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The main backup server pushes client-side encrypted backups which include the latest daily snapshot for every system to rsync.net via Borg.
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I also have 2 DASs with 2 22TB encrypted drives in each. One of these is plugged into the backup server while the other one sits powered off in a drawer in my desk at work. The main backup server pushes all backups to this DAS weekly and I swap the two DASs ~monthly so the one in my desk at work is never more than a month or so out of date.
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
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daily important stuff (job stuff, Documents folder, Renoise mods) is kept synced between laptop, desktop and home server via Syncthing. A vimwiki additionally also on the phone. Sync happens only when on home network.
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the rest of the laptop and desktop I'll roll into a tar backup every now and then with a quick bash alias. The tar files also get synced onto home server's big file system (2 TB ssd) via Syncthing.
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clever thing is that the 2 TB ssd replaced an old 2 TB spinning disk. I kept the old disk and set up a systemd thing that keeps it spun down, but starts and mounts it once a week and rsyncs the changes to the ssd over, then unmounts it so that it sleeps again for a week. That old drive is likely to serve for years still with this frugal use.
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Itâs not a drawback because rsync has supported incremental versioned backups for over a decade, you just have to use the --link-dest flag and add a couple lines of code around it for management.
Sure, but that's not in their answer.
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Sure, but that's not in their answer.
They didn't provide an rsync example until later in the post, the comment about not supporting differential backups is in reference to using rsync itself, which is incorrect, because rsync does support differential backups.
I agree with you that not doing differential backups is a problem, I'm simply commenting that this is not a drawback of using rsync, it's an implementation problem on the user's part. It would be like somebody saying "I like my Rav4, it's just problematic because I don't go to the grocery store with it" and someone else saying "that's a big drawback, the grocery store has a lot of important items and you need to be able to go to it". While true, it's based on a faulty premise, because of course a Rav4 can go to the grocery store like any other car, it's a non-issue to begin with. OP just needs to fix their backup script to start doing differential backups.
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I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server.
It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?
Right now, nothing
(but my dotfiles/etc configs live on several machines)Before, I used Restic (incremental, encrypted backup over network), which I really liked. I think I should set it up again.
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They didn't provide an rsync example until later in the post, the comment about not supporting differential backups is in reference to using rsync itself, which is incorrect, because rsync does support differential backups.
I agree with you that not doing differential backups is a problem, I'm simply commenting that this is not a drawback of using rsync, it's an implementation problem on the user's part. It would be like somebody saying "I like my Rav4, it's just problematic because I don't go to the grocery store with it" and someone else saying "that's a big drawback, the grocery store has a lot of important items and you need to be able to go to it". While true, it's based on a faulty premise, because of course a Rav4 can go to the grocery store like any other car, it's a non-issue to begin with. OP just needs to fix their backup script to start doing differential backups.
My one and only purpose was to warn them that their "drawback" is more of a gator pit. It's noble that you're here defending rsync's honor, but maybe let them know instead? My preferred backup tool has "don't eat my data" mode on by default.
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I'm curious, is there a reason why noone uses deja-dup? I use it with an external SSD on Ubuntu and (receently) Mint, where it comes pre-installed, and did not encounter Problems.
The restore process takes forever and sometimes fails. Last time I was forced to try every daily backup to several days before last backup to find one that could actually be restored. I have switched to borg (using Pika Backup for desktop and Borgmatic for servers). No restores have failed since.
