Can you please share your backup strategies for linux? I’m curious to know what tools you use and why?How do you automate/schedule backups? Which files/folders you back up? What is your prefered hardware/cloud storage and how do you manage storage space?
What’s a backup?
All my code and projects are on GitHub/codeberg.
All my personal info and photos are on proton drive.
If Linux shits itself (and it does often) who cares. I can have it up and running again in a fresh install in ten minutes.
I plug in an external drive every so often and drag and drop parts of my home dir into it like it’s 1997. I’m not running a data center here. The boomer method is good enough and I don’t do anything important enough to warrant going all out with professional snapshot based backup solutions and stuff. And I only save personal documents, media, and custom config files. Everything else is replaceable.
Not to save stuff
I use rsync to incrementally back up / to a separate drive, as well as a drive on another device (my server), which then packs, compresses and encrypts the latest backup of all devices daily, and uploads them to Hetzner as well as GDrive.
I use Borg Backup, automated with a bash script that Borg provides. A cron job runs the script at the desired frequency. I keep backups on different computers, ideally I would recommend one copy in the cloud and one copy on a local machine. Borg compresses and encrypts its backups.
Edit: I migrated a server once using the backups from this system and it worked great.
Borg backup is gold standard, with Vorta as a very nice GUI on machines that need it. Otherwise, all my other Linux machines are running in proxmox hypervisors and have container/snapshot/vm backups regularly through proxmox backup server to another machine. All the backup data is then replicated regularly, remotely via truenas scale replication tasks.
I was talking with a techhead from the 80s about what he did when his tape drives failed and the folly that is keeping data alive on a system that doesn’t need to be. His foolproof backup storage is as follows.
- At Christmas buy a new hard drive. If Moore’s law allows, it should be double what you currently have
- Put your current backup hardrive into a SATA drive slot. Copy over backup into new hard drive.
- Write with a sharpie the date at which this was done on the harddrive. The new hard drive is your current backup.
- Place the now old backup into your drawer and forget about it.
- On New Years Day, load each of the drives into a SATA drive slot and fix any filesystem issues.
- Put them back into the drawer. Go to step 1.
