Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to be smart do to this.

You just have to find some tools and services that are "fire and forget."

This is what I do:

1. All my working files are in my Dropbox account (or my corporate Dropbox account). I did this initially to support working off two machines interchangeably, but the fact of the matter is that this creates an easy versioned backup of your "live" files. Nowadays, my Dropbox is fully mirrored on TWO backup computers here in my office (ie, a spare machine and an old machine).

Setup Effort: Minimal. Ongoing Effort: Almost zero.

2. Because I use a Mac, I have Time Machine. It's glorious and can save your butt. It's the ONLY of these mechanisms I've ever had to use at scale (after a break-in and a stolen laptop). It worked flawlessly. Use it if you can. Every year or so, I get a new TM drive and archive the old one.

Setup Effort: VERY Minimal. Ongoing Effort: Zero.

3. I also use Backblaze for offsite backup security. I happen to live on the gulf coast, so major storms are a concern, but there's probably some house-eating danger wherever YOU live.

Setup Effort: Moderate. Ongoing Effort: Minimal.

4. Finally -- and this is the only part that needs actual action -- periodically I take a full image backup of my main machine's drive and archive it.

Setup Effort: Moderate. Ongoing Effort: Moderate.

I keep my newest image and my last TM drive in someone else's house, too, but that MAY be paranoia.

You don't have to be smart do to this.

You just have to find some tools and services that are "fire and forget."

You just lost 99.99% of the population.

To be fair, several options do not require changing habits or behaviors once in place, and setting them up requires minimal assistance at most for the truly technically challenged.

The problem, I think, is less in finding them and more simply knowing that keeping offsite backups is important (or any backups at all for that matter).

Edit: especially given the prompt of someone who is impared, very young or otherwise 'less able' whatever that might mean to you.

> To be fair, several options do not require changing habits or behaviors once in place

Please share.

You'd be surprised how many people have Google Drive, which really is fire and forget. As are all the other cloud services. Hence their popularity.

Or how many people lost their data because it was in the cloud. Forget and fire.

I can't find such tool for the love of me.

I'm ok to pay for it but:

1 - I need the client to use encryption and be open source

2 - It needs to run on linux

3 - It needs to backup files in arbitrary locations, including spanning several partitions (one NTFS, one ext3)

4 - It needs good filtering / curation capabilities

5 - Restore should have great granularity, and I should be able to browser the archive without having to unpack it all

6 - it needs to be easy to setup. I don't want to setup my own instance or mess with config files.

I've never found a tools that could do all that. One of those always fail, and sometimes the tool promise all of them, but doesn't even manage to backup. Some backup only partially, missing a files. Some backup, and don't restore. Some can only restore the all archive. Some don't encrypt. Some are close source, or only available on Mac and Linux. Some will store wrong files, and you can't them out of the backup.

It's crazy that in 2021, the state of backup sucks so much.

So have 2 backups on 2 different hard drives for all my files. One with "way back machine", the other one with a simple cp. Then I take essential files, and I put them on a usb drive.

My only remote backup are githup repo and emails.

Any suggestion?

I use Vorta, a GUI client for BorgBackup, together with rsync.net and it works rather well (besides Vorta being still far from polished).

I use Vorta with borgbase.com on my Mac. But borg has no native Windows support (only WSL). It clearly doesn't meet BiteCode_dev's requirements.

You have a very particular list, so it's not at all surprising that you're having trouble finding something.

> It needs to run on linux

That right there is going to imply some level of knowledge from the user. Expecting a zero-config install for Linux is pushing it to begin with.

> It needs to backup files in arbitrary locations, including spanning several partitions (one NTFS, one ext3)

And

> It needs good filtering / curation capabilities

And

> it needs to be easy to setup. I don't want to setup my own instance or mess with config files.

Are pretty much mutually exclusive. If you want it to be powerful you'll need to do the work to configure it. If you don't want to do the work it's not going to meet your needs, period. No product exists that will meet all of these criteria, even for Windows. I don't think a product exists that would meet half of them, and certainly if it does it's not open source.

What you really want is rsync over SSH to a ZFS volume with encryption enabled, or some other CoW filesystem that lets you do snapshots and access them online.

If you want to get close, go buy a Synology NAS and set up a nightly rsync cron to it, then set it up to archive to AWS Glacier. That'll get you most of the way to your ideal, and it'll be done instead of perfect.

> Expecting a zero-config install for Linux is pushing it to begin with.

How so? Dropbox is zero config install for linux.

> Are pretty much mutually exclusive. If you want it to be powerful you'll need to do the work to configure it.

I never said zero config, I said easy to configure. Firefox has plenty of configuration nobs, but it's easy to configure it.

> What you really want is rsync over SSH to a ZFS volume with encryption enabled, or some other CoW filesystem that lets you do snapshots and access them online.

No because that's very complicated. I've done it in the past, and just the fact I have to manage a VPS to do so is more than what I want to do.

I've used rsync as well, it's again, too much scripting, meaning to much margin for errors.

Apple Time machine for linux is what I want, with remote capabilities.

You have Dropbox and it's no-config required. What's wrong with that? Is it that you have to configure it for it to do what you want, and you don't want to take the time to do so?

You don't want to set up a VPS, even though I mentioned nothing about one. I said to buy an appliance, same as a Time Capsule or whatever that Apple thing used to be called.

You think rsync+SSH+snapshot is complicated, but you don't know that Time Machine is exactly that, just hidden from you so if anything goes wrong it's a black box that you can't recover from.

You think rsync is too much scripting - what are you trying to do that requires scripting beyond `rsync -aP src dest`?

I use borg with rsync.net (and another host as a backup-backup). Works on linux. Backs up what I tell it to, I can mount any historical backup as a filesystem and copy stuff over. Uses encryption, is open source. You can point it to multiple backup locations for local and remote backups. Works for me. Takes about three minutes to do an incremental backup to two locations every evening.

I get that you want what you want, but I gently note that I see quite often in FOSS circles people decide they need a laundry list of things unsatisfied by the available offerings and determine the field is a mess.

You've DQ'd the majority of backup services with your first requirement. You want what you want, but realize you're doing it.

Nah. The nontechnical know people like us. I hate troubleshooting other people's computers, but I will absolutely help anyone and everyone do two things whenever practical:

1. Set up a backup regime

2. Set up a password vault

Lol. Exactly what I thought :)

How do you do Time Machine backups without ongoing effort? Do you backup to a network drive or something like that?

What effort? It runs automatically every hour. They include that they buy a new drive on which backups are written and archive the old one. Presumably they buy drives that are big enough to have a full backup and a reasonable about of space for the diffs (a drive 50% larger than the one being backed up is typically sufficient).

Since Time Machine is in addition to other backup methods, they don't need to make an effort to keep a Time Machine drive offsite.

What I meant is, you have to physically connect the drive, unless you're using a Network drive, and I wanted to know how their setup works. I tried setting up Time Machine via Network Drive once and it didn't work so well, so I'm trying to learn.

Using Time Machine via network is the only way I have ever used it. I initially used Apple Time Capsule (RIP), and now just use a Time Machine compatible NAS.

I run a usb cable from the back of my imac to a drive hidden underneath my desk. It is effectively zero maintenance, because time machine removes old backups to make space for the new.

For laptops I would aim for a setup where the drive is connected to whatever dock solution is in place. MacOS would backup automatically while the laptop was docked.

Time Machine has been the only way I've been able to get the majority of my family's devices to consistently back up. Thankfully it's a mostly-mac house. Have an always-on Debian machine which acts as a NAS. Install and configure netatalk and avahi.

Edit /etc/netatalk/afp.conf:

    [Time Machine]
    path = /path/to/backups
    time machine = yes

And you're done. Don't lift a finger to do backups ever again.

Thank you!

Too complicated. Just connect a drive via USB.

not OP, but yes, I backup both our Mac machines (TimeMachine) and my Linux machine (restic) to a Synology NAS that is in turn backed up to a cloud. I ended up using the Synology cloud because the setup was easy and they have a datacenter in the EU.

Yes, time machine can run over the network. It really is easy.

Even with a Time Capsule, Time Machine can be annoying. I had to turn automatic backups off because for some reason every backup was hundreds of MB. It took my 2017 MBP 15-30 mins to complete each backup, which meant that 25-50% of the time my computer was on, it was backing up. This meant the fan was going and the computer slowed down.

Review your backup config, because it sounds like you're accidentally picking up something you shouldn't be.

This happened to me at one point and the culprit ended up being that I had failed to exclude the folder holding my VMs.

The current TM drive is plugged into the hub on my desk.

In these COVID times, my laptop rarely leaves that desk, but even when it does there's only one cable to plug it all -- monitors, ethernet, various other peripherals, speakers, power -- into my laptop.

So you just have to use dropbox, time machine, backblaze, several drive backups and someone's else house to store drives, simple!

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