Borg to a NAS.

500GB of that NAS is “special” so I then rsync that to a 500GB old laptop hdd, of which is is duplicated again to another 500GB old laptop hdd.

Same 500GB rsync’d to Cloud Server.

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.)

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 rsync ~/ to a USB nub. A no brainer.

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.

rsync 😪

Backup? What?

i do backups of my home folder with Vorta, tha uses borg in the backend. I never tried restic, but borg is the first incremental backup utility i tried that doesnt increase the backup size when i move or rename a file. I was using backintime before to backup 500gb on a 750gb drive and if I moved 300gb to a different folder, it would try to copy those 300gb again onto the backup drive and fail for lack of storage, while borg handles it beautifully.

as an offsite solution, i use syncthing to mirror my files to a pc at my fathers house that is turned on just once in a while to save power and disc longevity.

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.

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

Since most of the machines I need to backup are VMs, I do it by the means of hypervisor. I’d use borg scheduled in crontab for physical ones.

I recently switched to Kopia for my offsite backup solution.

It’s apparently one of the faster options, and it can be set up so that the files of the differential backups are handled by a repository server on the offsite end, so file management doesn’t need to happen over the network at a snails pace.

The result is a way to maintain frequent full backups of my nextcloud instance, with almost no downtime.

Nextcloud only goes into maintenance mode for the duration of a postgres database dump, after which the actual file system backup occurs using a temporary btrfs snapshot, containing a frozen filesystem at the time of the database dump.

I’ve found that the easiest and most effective way to backup 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.

(Edit: two stupid errors.)

I use borg the same way you describe. Part of my nixos config builds a systemd unit that starts a backup on various directories on my machine at midnight every day. I have 2 repos: one to store locally and on a cloud backup provider (borgbase) and another thats just stored locally. That is, another computer in my house. That local only is for all my home media. I havent yet put the large dataset of photos and videos on the cloud or offsite.

My systems are all on btrfs, so I make use of subvolumes and use brkbk to backup snapshots to other locations.