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?
Backup? What?
Your car.
I use Pika Backup (GUI that uses Borg Backup on the backend) to back up my desktop to my home server daily, then overnight that server has a daily backup using Borg to a Hetzner Storage Box. It’s easy to set it and forget it (other than maybe verifying the backups every once in a while), and having that off site back up gives me peace of mind.
I recently bought a storagebox from Hatzner and set up my server to run borgmatic every day to backup to it.
I’ve also discovered that Pika Backup works really well as a “read only” graphical browser for borg repos.
Do you use some kind of encryption on the VPS?
Yep, borgmatic encrypts it before it sends data to the server.
I use external drive for my important data and if my system is borked (which never happen to me) I just reinstall the OS
External drives are more prone to damage and failures, both because they’re more likely to be dropped/bumped/spilled on etc, and because of generally cheaper construction compared to internal drives. In the case of SSDs the difference might be negligible, but I suggest you at least make a copy on another “cold” external drive if the data is actually important
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.)
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.
Rsync can do incremental backups with a command-line switch and some symlink jugglery. I’m using it to back up my self-hosted stuff.
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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 syncs with 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. Home server backs itself up on it’s own once a week.
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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.
How do you make sure the disk spins down? Is unmounting enough?
Unmounting is enough if the disk has spindown configured. I’ve got this in /etc/udev/rules.d/ :
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ENV{ID_SERIAL_SHORT}=="S2H7J9FZB02854", RUN+="/usr/bin/hdparm -S 70 /dev/%k"
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