Can you please share your backup strategies for linux? I’m curious to know what tools you use and why?How do you automate/schedule backups? Which files/folders you back up? What is your prefered hardware/cloud storage and how do you manage storage space?
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.
I use
restic, have also been looking atkopiaandborgI 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.
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 ;)
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.
My laptop has a microsd card reader that when filled is almost flush so i just keep a micro sd card in there and have timeshift back up to it. Partitioned with full disk encryption so it cant just be stolen and scanned.
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.
All my code and projects are on GitHub/codeberg.
All my personal info and photos are on proton drive.
If Linux shits itself (and it does often) who cares. I can have it up and running again in a fresh install in ten minutes.
Constant work in progress.
What’s a backup?
My desktop, laptop and homelab all synd my important stuff over syncthing. They all do btrfs snapshots three months back in case an oopsie would propagate.
The homelab additionally fetches deduplicated snapshots of my VPS weekly, before syncing all of the above to an encrypted hetzner storage for those burning-down-the-house events.
I plug in an external drive every so often and drag and drop parts of my home dir into it like it’s 1997. I’m not running a data center here. The boomer method is good enough and I don’t do anything important enough to warrant going all out with professional snapshot based backup solutions and stuff. And I only save personal documents, media, and custom config files. Everything else is replaceable.
yeah about the same, old coot here, I plug a USB3-SSD (encrypted with LUKS) and rsync from internal HD to this external HD. That’s it.
Daily rsync to a local nas and weekly backups to offsite with pika-backup.
Borg backup is gold standard, with Vorta as a very nice GUI on machines that need it. Otherwise, all my other Linux machines are running in proxmox hypervisors and have container/snapshot/vm backups regularly through proxmox backup server to another machine. All the backup data is then replicated regularly, remotely via truenas scale replication tasks.
Adding my “Me too” to Vorta/Borg. I use it with Borgbase, which I like because it’s legitimately cheap and they support Borg development. As well, you can set Borg backups with Borgbase to “append only,” which prevents ransomware or other unexpected “whoopsies” from wiping out your backup history.
I backup most of my computer every hour, but have pruning rules that make sure things don’t get too out of hand. I have a second backup that backs everything up to my NAS (using Vorta, again). This is helpful for things like my downloads folder, virtual machines, or STEAM library - things I wouldn’t want to backup over the network, but on occasion I do find myself going “whoops, I wanted that.”
I also have Vorta working on my Mom’s Macbook, then have Borgbase send me an email when there isn’t any activity for longer than a couple of days. Once I got automatic pruning working right I never had to touch this again.
Borg with Vorta’s my go to as well. Resistance is futile.
Borg via Vorta handles the hard parts: encryption, compression, deduplication, and archiving. You can mount backup snapshots like drives, without needing to expand them. It splits archives into small chunks so you can easily upload them to your cloud service of choice.