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?
Here's one that probably nobody else here is doing. The backup goes on my mobile device. Yes, the thing in my pocket.
Mount it over SSHFS on the local network
Unlock a LUKS container in the form of a 30GB sparse file on the device
rsync the files across
Lock, unmount
The backup is incremental but the container file never changes size, no matter what's in it. Your data is in two places and always under your physical control. But the key is never stored on the remote device, so you could also do this with a VPS.
Good question. No, but at a small cost in security. The key I generated using sha512sum using a very solid memorized passphrase. This means I can regenerate the key in the scenario you describe.