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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s nothing saved on my system I couldn’t afford to lose. All my work stuff is saved in Google Drive for better or worse. I have a few small files in a personal Proton Drive that I backup manually. I wipe my own system a few times a year and I rarely ever save anything first. Honestly very refreshing to live your life like that. Other than my cat, pretty much all my possessions could disappear tomorrow and I’d get over it pretty quickly.

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 currently use rclone with encryption to iDrive e2. I’m considering switching to Backrest, though.

I originally tried Backblaze b2, but exceeded their API quotas in their free tier and iDrive has “free” API calls, so I recently bought a year’s worth. I still have a 2 year Proton subscription and tried rclone with Proton drive, but it was too slow.

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

I keep all of my documents on a local server so all that is on any of my computers is software. So if I need to reinstall Linux I cab just do it without wording about losing anything.