Ask HN: How do you back up your 'daily driver' computer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you back up your 'daily driver' computer?

3 pointshayksaakian8 comments

I'm interested in hearing what tools or processes other folks here use to back up their main computer.

The online research on this seems to be full of affiliate sites with mixed incentives, so I'm looking for direct, first hand experiences.

I would feel pretty bad if my macbook SSD died with no way to recover it, so it's better to be safe than sorry.

Automated daily backups on my servers from the hosting providers saved me tons of time the last few years, so I want to take precautions on my personal computer too.

What do you recommend?

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My method is to use rsnapshot [1] to make a local copy. The rsnapshot script uses hard links to save space for files that have not changed. That has made fixing a corrupted git repo easy and I am lazy so that works for me.

I then rsync that snapshot to a local NAS and also copy that data from the NAS to external SSD USB drives. The NAS also has rsnapshot for important folders. The SSD drives get unplugged and one goes into my vehicle in case the house converts to another state of matter.

If something is extra important I encrypt it and then lftp+sftp [2] it to a chroot SFTP server on the internet. The lftp command has a mirror sub-system that can replicate most of the behavior of rsync except using multiple threads to a chroot sftp-only server to make it faster than native rsync.

[1] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/rsnapshot

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lftp

Always have local and offsite backup, so you can get to it quick when the laptop dies, but still have options when the house burns down. For me that is:

* Connect an external drive every few days for Time Machine to do it's magic. If I forget, it will remind me after a week or so.

* Continuous offsite backup using Backblaze. Really, they're great!

If you want continuous backup locally too, you could use a NAS for Time Machine to backup to instead of a simple drive.

did you compare options when choosing backblaze? the only other one i see recommended online is carbonite

I used to use Crashplan on Windows back in the day, but their interface is (was?) horrible and it's all Java, so when I switched to Mac I compared some options and in the end chose Backblaze.

I do two things, about once per day, and never both at once:

1) Time Machine backup to external hard disc at my desk that is only connected and powered up for this job.

2) Off-grid back-up of less-sensitive stuff to Google Drive.

I also occasionally put a key backup off-site, eg I just gave a 5GB tarball of my key SVN repo to a friend to put on their backup system!

Answer from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29912971

Apple Time Capsules still work on Ventura macOS. And the drives are easy to replace.

great tip! my only concern is it's a deprecated product so it won't receive security updates

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