The recent complaints about Google Drive files going missing also doesn't build confidence.
What are folks using for backups? Ideally automated processes.
Thank you.
10 Terabyte drivers are super cheap, and come in USB formats. My moat, which serves as first-stage backup, is a 10Tb drive hanging off of a Raspberry Pi at home. Everything ends up there. And that drive is the only drive I actually back up. Very simple.
Google I use only for stuff I might have to occasionally show other people.
I don't use external services for things I wouldn't be able to easily replace. Never have. Never will.
I run a daily cron job on the NAS that:
a) uses rsync to copy the important bits off various Linux & macOS machines back to a directory tree on the NAS.
b) I use PhotoSync to copy photos from phones to the NAS.
c) I use Bvckup2 to copy from Windows machines to the NAS.
d) mounts a HDD used as the backup medium. Currently a 16TB Seagate HDD. This just lives in one slot in the NAS, except when it's offsite, so the mount is unattended.
e) After the drive volume is mounted, I make a btrfs snapshot of the synced file tree, and save it on the mounted backup drive.
f) umount the volume.
Every month, I exchange the backup drive with a friend who lives in another city (so, I have _two_ backup drives: one local, one offsite, and swap them).
So I kinda have four copies of everything at various ages: the original, last night's synced copy, daily snapshots going back alternating months locally, and the opposite month's daily snapshots remotely.
At this point I have coming up on 10 years worth of snapshots. They're pretty small, because not a lot changes day-to-day.
I need to recover something a couple of times a year. One thing I'd like to do is add some automated testing of the recovery, but for now I just check the cron emails for errors every so often.
D has a folder named "Backup". In there I keep my Library (all photos, vids, ebooks, old stuff)
I Acronis-TrueImage my C drive to the D\Backup folder
I backup MyDocs and MyPortables from my C drive to Carbonite
I backup my D\Backup to Carbonite.
I got around 1.5 TB with Carbonite with my own encryption.
I started using SyncThing to sync laptop & desktop, so anything I do on the laptop finds its way to the desktop and then to Carbonite.
rsync transfers data from my laptop to my linux box, with a cron.
The linux box regularly creates new borg archives.
A different cron on the linux box rsyncs that data to two off-site locations, and once a week I manually rsync things over to a hard drive stored in a fire-proof safe.
I use healthchecks.io to get alerts for when those crons stop running for any reason.
But I like to dream that one day, my kids and grandkids will want to see blurry photographs documenting how much I binge-drank in college. Which sounds dumb, but I'd kind of love to see those photos from my dad and grandparents, if they existed!
[1]: https://restic.net/
[2]: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
[3]: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs-auto-snapshot
[4]: https://rclone.org/
[5]: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.h...
That replicates things across devices. For actual backups I'd use rsync, mostly because I already have all the scripts to make progressive backups with hard links.
Super helpful. Thanks again!
Do check the default exclusions though, it doesn't backup movie files by default... 8(
Runs in the background each night. NAS backup is full copy every 14 days and incremental inbetween, keeping the last 3-4 months.
Using full-disk backup is very convenient when the disk dies, just plop in a replacement and you're back up and running in short order.
Acronis is a Windows application, don't know of any OSX alternatives.
I use an automated process that involves a simultaneous daily backup to an onsite Synology NAS 2x10TB running SHR raid and a backblaze B2 encrypted bucket.
I started using iCloud for git as well due to needing some extra storage that GitHub would have charged me several times more for... unconventional use case where I need a lot of git LFS storage.
And I’d suggest enabling “advanced data protection” which is E2E encryption.
I use this method plus a syncthing folder to bridge everything from iCloud into my Linux box. It’s seamless.
"old school": i have an older pc of mine sitting in a corner, running linux - atm debian testing/trixie -, & its filled with a bunch of "somewhat outdated" hdds - of various sizes.
to access it i use
* borgbackup/vorta
* rsync over ssh (external)
* rsync over nfs (internal)
* samba
a remark on reliability:
* i make at least 2 copies of important data to different hdds
* the system is only active during backups and is disconnected from power - to avoid data-loss/problems due to lightning or power-surges.
* and yes, i don't disconnect the lan-cable - but what would live be w/o risks ;))
a remark on filesystems for such setups:
yes, btrfs would be great - respect the conjunctive here ;) - it would be great to create snapshots / generations etc.
but using rsync over larger datasets to a btrfs filesystem, especially if you have a lot of smaller files, can be very time-consuming ...
so i went back to ext4 ... and using rsync itself for snapshots ... sadly ;))
cheersv
I mount it like a regular encrypted device then rclone/rsync it elsewhere.
Very simple bash script run by my window manager: Sway
Maestral is an OSS Dropbox client true to Dropbox’s original mission before all the cruft.
I have three drives in different locations, and periodically rsync my home to each of them, then take btrfs snapshot.
rsync lets you exclude things in a finegrained way, similar to .gitignore. So I avoid saving huge binaries that can be recreated.
All this takes two lines of code. Rotating snapshots is also quite easy.
icloud for backing up my phone (mostly photos).
i also have a tiny usb flash drive always plugged in my laptop, which rsync's important files and directories every hour.