Linux

Constant work in progress.

For files are in git (using stow to recreate) and my documents folder is syncing to nextcloud (selfhosted) and this also to my laptop. This is of course not a "Backup" per se more a "multiple copies" but it gets the job done and also firs my workflow. To be happy with that I want to set up an offsite backup of data from my server to a NAS in my parents place but right now that's just a to-do I haven't put any work in yet ;)

I use restic, have also been looking at kopia and borg

The only thing I use as a backup is a Live CD that's mounted to a USB thumb drive.

I used to use Timeshift but the one time I needed it, it didn't work for some reason. It also had a problem of making my PC temporarily unusable while it was making a backup, so I didn't enable it when I had to reinstall Linux Mint.

Bareos. Its a newer Form of bacula and is a realworkhorse.

I use OneDrive. I know people will hate but it’s cheap and works on everything (well, it takes a third party tool on Linux). If I care about it it goes in OneDrive, otherwise I don’t need it that much.

Main drive is a 1 1TB super fast m.2 device, backup drive is an 8TB platter drive with btrfs.

Bunch of scripts I wrote myself copy all important stuff to the platter drive every night using rsync, then makes a snapshot with current date. Since its all copy on write, i have daily backups for like 3 years now. Some extra scripts clean up some of the older backups, lowering the backup frequency to once a week after a year, once every 4 weeks after 2 years.

I have similar solutions for my servers where i rsync the backups over the Internet.

.dotfiles on github

Big/critical files on an external HD

simple as

restic -> Wasabi, automated with shell script and cron. Uses an include list to tell it what paths to back up.

Script has Pushover credentials to send me backup alerts. Parses restic log to tell me how much was backed up, removed, success/failure of backup, and current repo size.

To be added: a periodic restore of a random file to have its hash compared to the current version of the file (will happen right after backup, unlikely to have changed in my workload), which will be subsequently deleted, and alert sent letting me know how the restore test went.

Software & Services:

• Restic client
• Restic REST server
• https://github.com/rbuchberger/res-man + systemd timers or cron to configure & run restic nightly
• healthchecks.io for monitoring
• ntfy.sh for notifications

Destinations:

• Local raspberry pi with external hdd, running restic REST server
• RAID 1 NAS at parents' house, connected via tailscale, also running restic REST

I've been meaning to set up a drive rotation for the local backup so I always have one offline in case of ransomware, but I haven't gotten to it.

Edit: For the backup set I back up pretty much everything. I'm not paying per gig, though.

I sync important files to s3 from a folder with awscli. Dot files and projects are in a private git repos. That's it.

If I maintained a server, I would do something more sophisticated, but installation is so dead simple these days that I could get a daily driver in working order very quickly.

If I feel like it, I might use DD to clone my drive and put in on a hard drive. Usually I don't back up, though.

I use syncthing to sync almost everything across my computer, laptop (occasional usage), server (RAID1), old laptop (powered up once every month or so), and a few other devices (that only get a small subset of my data, though). On the computer, laptop, and server, I have btrfs snapshots (snapper). Overall, this works very well, I always have 4+ copies of my data in 2+ geographical locations.

You have loads of options but you need to also start from ... "what if". Work out how important your data really is. Take another look and ask the kids and others if they give a toss. You might find that no one cares about your photo collection in which case if your phone dies ... who cares? If you do care then sync them to a PC or laptop.

Perhaps take a look at this - https://www.veeam.com/products/free/linux.html its free for a few systems.

For my home server, I use Restic and a cronjob to weekly take snapshots of all my services. It then gets synced to a Backblaze B2 bucket (at $6/TB/mo). It's pretty neat, only saving the difference between the previous and current snapshot, removes older snapshots, and encrypts everything.

Pika Backup for /home/ to an external drive. It's an automatic solution with a simple GUI that serves as a front end to Borg iirc. Lets you easily browse and mount old backups. Anything outside of my actual personal files can be recreated or restored trivially, so I don't care to back them up.

I also have a manual dump of /etc/ but i change it so infrequently that it doesn't really need looking after.

All of my servers make local dumps of their databases and config files to directories owned by unprivileged users. This includes file paths, permissions, and ownerships (so I know how to put them back).

My primary research server at home uses rsync to pull copies of those local backups from my servers.

My primary research server uses Restic to make a daily incremental backup to Backblaze's B2 service.

I have my important folders synced to my Nextcloud and create nightly snapshots of that to a different drive using borg.

One thing I still need to do, is offsite encrypted backups using rsync.

Internal RAID1 as first line of defense. Rsync to external drives where at least one is always offsite as second. Rclone to cloud storage for my most important data as the third.

Backups 2 and 3 are manual but I have reminders set and do it about once a month. I don't accrue much new data that I can't easily replace so that's fine for me.

I built a backup server out of my old desktop, running Ubuntu and ZFS

I have a dataset for each of my computers and i back them up to the corresponding datasets in the zfs pool on the server semi-regularly. The zfs pool has enough disks for some redundancy, so i can handle occasional drive failures. My other computers run arbitrary filesystems (ext4, btrfs, rarely ntfs)

the only problem with my current setup is that if there is file degradation on my workstation that i dont notice, it might get backed up to the server by mistake. then a degraded file might overwrite a non-degraded backup. to avoid this, i generally dont overwrite files when i backup. since 90% of my data is pictures, it's not a big deal since they dont change

Someday i'd like to set up proxmox and virtualize everything, and i'd also like to set up something offsite i could zfs-send to as a second backup

All important files go in /data.

/data is ZFS, snapped and sent to NAS regularly

Every time I change a setting, it gets added to a dconf script. Every time I install software, I write a script.

Dotfiles git repo for home directory.

With that, I can spin up a fresh machine in minutes with scripts.

My backup is begging my computer to implode so I can experience the sweet relief of getting offline.

But also I use external discs and make copies of important files I can't recreate. Don't care too much about config as I am happy enough to distro hop and set things up anew.

Pendrive for the important stuff, paper for the really important stuff and brain for everything else.

For system files/configuration on my machines, timeshift set to run once a week.

For family photos and shared files, I built a pair of SFTP servers made from old HP thin-client PCs at two different geographic locations which automatically sync to each other once a day via cron job using vsftpd and lftp. Each one has both an NVMe and SATA SSD which run in a software RAID 1 configuration.

For any other files, a second local server also using vsftpd and two SSDs in USB enclosures. I manually back them up using rsync on an irregular basis.