How often do you run backups on your system?
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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.
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Thanks for sharing the details on this, very interesting!
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I just tell it to back up my laptops every hour anyway. If it’s not on, it just doesn’t happen, but it’s generally on enough to capture what I need.
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I tried Kopia but it was unstable and janky, so now it's whenever I remember to manually run a bunch of rsync. I backup my desktop to cold storage on the first of the month, so I should get in the habit of backing up my server to the NAS then also.
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What's the second B stand for?
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And equally important, how do you do your backups? What system and to where?
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Every hour. Could do it more frequently if needed.
It depends on how resource intensive the backup process is.
Consider an 800GB Immich instance.
Using Duplicity or rsync takes 1.5 hours per backup. 99% of the time is spent in traversing the directory structure and checking which files have changed. 1% is spent into transferring the difference to the backup. Any backup system that operates on top of the file system would take this much. In addition, unless you're using something that can take snapshots of the filesystem, you have to stop Immich during the backup process in order to prevent backing up an invalid app state.
Using ZFS send on the other hand (with syncoid) takes less than 5 seconds to discover the differences and the rest of the time is spent on the data transfer, at 100MB/s in my case.
When I used Duplicity to backup, I would backup once week because the backup process was long and heavy on the disk array. Since I switched to ZFS send, I do it once an hour because there's almost no visible impact.
I'm now in the process of migrating my laptop to ZFS on root in order to be able to utilize ZFS send for regular full system backups. If successful, eventually I'll move all my machines to ZFS on root.
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Local zfs snap every 5 mins.
Borg backups everything hour to 3 different locations.
I've blown away docker folders of config files a few times by accident. So far I've only had to dip into the zfs snaps to bring them back.
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Daily backups.
Currently using restic on my NixOS servers. To avoid data corruption, I make a zfs snapshot at 2am, and after that restic does a backup of my mutable data dirs both to my local Nas and CloudFlare r3.
The Nas backup folder is synced to backblaze nightly as well for a more cold store. -
Try ZFS send if you have ZFS on the other side. It's insane.
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If you haven't tested your backups, you ain't got a backup.
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Beets.
Or bears.
Or buttsex.
It’s context dependent, like “cool”.
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Depends on the application. I run a nightly backup of a few VM's because realistically they dont change much. I have containers on the other hand that run critical (to me) systems like my photo backup and they are backed up twice a day.
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If Raid is backup, is Unraid forthdown or just data loss?
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I do not as I cannot afford the extra storage required to do so.
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I would but the other side isn't zfs so I went with borg instead
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I honestly don't have too much to back up, so I run one full backup job every Sunday for different directories I care about. They run a check on the directory and only back up any changes or new files. I don't have the space to backup everything, so I only take the smaller stuff and most important. The backup software also allows live monitoring if I enable it, so some of my jobs I have that turned on since I didn't see any reason not to. I reuse the NAS drives that report errors that I replace with new ones to save on money. So far, so good.
Backup software is Bvckup2, and reddit was a huge fan of it years ago, so I gave it a try. It was super cheap for a lifetime license at the time, and it's super lightweight. Sorry, there is no Linux version.
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Longest interval is every 24 hours. With some more frequent like every 6 hours or so, like the ones for my game servers.
