How do you all go about backing up your data, on Linux?

I don't. I lose my data like all the cool (read: fool) kids.

Timeshift is a great tool for creating incremental backups. Basically it's a frontend for rsync and it works great. If needed you can also use it in CLI

I use Borg backup with Vorta for a GUI. Hasn't let me down yet.

Is it just me or the backup topic is recurring each few days on !linux@lemmy.ml and !selfhosted@lemmy.world?

To be on topic as well - I use restic+autorestic combo. Pretty simple, I made repo with small script to generate config for different machines and that's it. Storing between machines and b2.

I have a bash script that backs all my stuff up to my Homeserver with Borg. My servers have cronjobs that run similar scripts.

I like rsnapshot, run from a cron job at various useful intervals. backups are hardlinked and rotated so that eventually the disk usage reaches a very slowly growing steady state.

I use restic (https://restic.net/) which can use rclone to connect to a variety of backends (eg. onedrive, mega, dropbox etc.). Also, resticprofile (https://restic.net/) makes it easier to run (hides flags in the config file). I use it manually but a cron job would be easy to implement (a tutorial is here: https://forum.yunohost.org/t/daily-automated-backups-using-restic/16812).

I use Back In Time to backup my important data on an external drive. And for snapshots I use timeshift.

Pika Backup (GUI for borgbackup) is a great app for backups. It has all the features you might expect from backup software and "just works".

Exactly like you think. Cronjob runs a periodic rsync of a handful of directories under /home. My OS is on a different drive that doesn't get backed up. My configs are in an ansible repository hosted on my home server and backed up the same way.

rsync + backblaze B2. Bafkblaze is stupid cheap.

Cost is about $10 per year.

I do periodic backups of my system from live usb via Borg Backup to a samba share.

Duplicity (cli) with deja-dup (gui) has saved my sorry ass many times.

Used to use Duplicati but it was buggy and would often need manual intervention to repair corruption. I gave up on it.

Now use Restic to Backblaze B2. I've been very happy.

Check out Pika backup. It's a beautiful frontend for Borg. And Borg is the shit.

Kopia or Restic. Both do incremental, deduplicated backups and support many storage services.

Kopia provides UI for end user and has integrated scheduling. Restic is a powerfull cli tool thatlyou build your backup system on, but usually one does not need more than a cron job for that. I use a set of custom systems jobs and generators for my restic backups.

Keep in mind, than backups on local, constantly connected storage is hardly a backup. When the machine fails hard, backups are lost ,together with the original backup. So timeshift alone is not really a solution. Also: test your backups.

Permanently Deleted

BTRFS filesystem, Snapper for taking periodic snapshots and snap-sync for saving one to an external drive every now and then.

BTRFS is what makes everything incremental.

by the way, syncthing is great if you need bi-directional sync.
not exactly what you're looking for (sth like Duplicacy?) but you should probably know about it as it's a great tool.

I have scripts scheduled to run rsync on local machines, which save incremental backups to my NAS. The NAS in turn is incrementally backed up to a remote server with Borg.

Not all of my machines are on all the time so I also built in a routine which checks how old the last backup is, and only makes a new one if the previous backup is older than a set interval.

I also save a lot of my config files to a local git repo, the database of which is regularly dumped and backed up in the same way as above.

I don't, really. I don't have much data that is irreplaceable.

The ones that are get backed up manually to Proton Drive and my NAS (manually via SMB).

All my devices use Syncthing via Tailscale to get my data to my server.

From there, my server backs up nightly to rsync.net via BorgBackup.

I then have Zabbix monitoring my backups to make sure a daily is always uploaded.

I rotate between a few computers. Everything is synced between them with syncthing and they all have automatic btrfs snapshots. So I have several physical points to roll back from.

For a worst case scenario everything is also synced offsite weekly to a pCloud share. I have a little script that mounts it with pcloudfs, encfs and then rsyncs any updates.

Git projects and system configs are on GitHub (see etckeeper), the reset is synced to my self-hosted Nextcloud instance using their desktop client. There I have periodic backup using Borg for both the files and Nextcloud database.

Restic since 2018, both to locally hosted storage and to remote over ssh. I've "stuff I care about" and "stuff that can be relatively easily replaced" fairly well separated so my filtering rules are not too complicated. I used duplicity for many years before that and afbackup to DLT IV tapes prior to that.

Use synching on several devices to replicate data I want to keep backups of. Family photos, journals, important docs, etc. Works perfect and I run a relay node to give back to the community given I am on a unlimited data connection.

I use Rclone which has both an WEBUI and CLI.

dont keep anything u would be upset to lose /s

I use rsync+btrfs snapshot solution.

1. Use rsync to incrementally collect all data into a btrfs subvolume
2. Deduplicate using duperemove
3. Create a read-only snapshot of the subvolume

I don't have a backup server, just an external drive that I only connect during backup.

Deduplication is mediocre, I am still looking for snapshot aware duperemove replacement.

I just run my own nextcloud instance. Everything important is synced to that with the nextcloud desktop client, and the server keeps a month's worth of backups on my NAS via rsync.

I do a periodic backup with Vorta towards my server. The server does a daily backup to an S3 service with Restic

DejaDup on one computer. Another is using Syncthing, another I do a manual Grsync. i really should have a better plan. lol

timeshift with system files and manually my home folder

Permanently Deleted

I use rsync to an external drive, but before that I toyed a bit with pika backup.

I don't automate my backup because i physically connect my drive to perform the task.

Setup

Machine A:

• RAIDz1 takes care of single-disk failure
• ZFS doing regular snapshots
• Syncthing replicates the data off-site to Machine B

Machine B:

• RAIDz1 takes care of single-disk failure
• ZFS doing regular snapshots
• Syncthing receiving data from Machine A

Implications

• Any single-disk hardware failure on machine A or B results in no data loss
• Physical destruction of A won't affect B and the other way around
• Any accidentally deleted or changed file can be recovered from a previous snapshot
• Any ZFS corruption at A doesn't affect B because send/recv isn't used. The two filesystems are completely independent
• Any malicious data destruction on A can be recovered from B even if it's replicated via snapshot at B. The reverse is also true. A malicious actor would have to have root access on both A and B in order to destroy the data and the snapshots on both machines to prevent recovery
• Any data destruction caused by Syncthing can be recovered from snapshot at A or B

I use Restic, called from cron, with a password file containing a long randomly generated key.

I back up with Restic to a repository on a different local hard drive (not part of my main RAID array), with --exclude-caches as well as excluding lots of files that can easily be re-generated / re-installed/ re-downloaded (so my backups are focused on important data). I make sure to include all important data including /etc (and also backup the output of dpkg --get-selections as part of my backup). I auto-prune my repository to apply a policy on how far back I keep (de-duplicated) Restic snapshots.

Once the backup completes, my script runs du -s on the backup and emails me if it is unexpectedly too big (e.g. I forgot to exclude some new massive file), otherwise it uses rclone sync to sync the archive from the local disk to Backblaze B2.

I backup my password for B2 (in an encrypted password database) separately, along with the Restic decryption key. Restore procedure is: if the local hard drive is intact, restore with Restic from the last good snapshot on the local repository. If it is also destroyed, rclone sync the archive from Backblaze B2 to local, and then restore from that with Restic.

Postgres databases I do something different (they aren't included in my Restic backups, except for config files): I back them up with pgbackrest to Backblaze B2, with archive_mode on and an archive_command to archive WALs to Backblaze. This allows me to do PITR recovery (back to a point in accordance with my pgbackrest retention policy).

For Docker containers, I create them with docker-compose, and keep the docker-compose.yml so I can easily re-create them. I avoid keeping state in volumes, and instead use volume mounts to a location on the host, and back up the contents for important state (or use PostgreSQL for state instead where the service supports it).

At the core it has always been rsync and Cron. Sure I add a NAS and things like rclone+cryptomator to have extra copies of synchronized data (mostly documents and media files) spread around, but it's always rsync+Cron at the core.

I run ZFS on my servers and then replicate to other ZFS servers with Syncoid.

Do most of my work on nfs, with zfs backing on raidz2, send snapshots for offline backup.

Don't have a serious offsite setup yet, but it's coming.

Github for projects, Syncthing to my NAS for some config files and that's pretty much it, don't care for the rest.

I've got a smb server setup with a 12tb server drive. Anything important gets put on there

Edit: fixed spelling

I use lucky backup to mirror to external drive. And I also use Duplicacy to back up 2 other separate drives at the same time. Have a read on the data hoarder wiki on backups.

I use bupstash to backup to a server I built a few years ago

When I do something really dumb I typically just use dd to create an iso. I should probably find something better.

I use timeshift. It really is the best. For servers I go with restic.

Anything important I keep in my Dropbox folder, so then I have a copy on my desktop, laptop, and in the cloud.

When I turn off my desktop, I use restic to backup my Dropbox folder to a local external hard drive, and then restic runs again to back up to Wasabi which is a storage service like amazon's S3.

Same exact process for when I turn off my laptop.. except sometimes I don't have my laptop external hd plugged in so that gets skipped.

So that's three local copies, two local backups, and two remote backup storage locations. Not bad.

Changes I might make:

• add another remote location
• rotate local physical backup device somewhere (that seems like a lot of work)
• move to next cloud or seafile instead of Dropbox

I used seafile for a long time but I couldn't keep it up so I switched to Dropbox.

Advice, thoughts welcome.

A separate NAS on an atom cpu with btrfs of raid 10 exposed over NFS.

Periodic backup to external drive via Deja Dup. Plus, I keep all important docs in Google Drive. All photos are in Google Photos. So it's only my music really which isn't in the cloud. But I might try upload it to Drive as well one day.

Either an external hard drive or a pendrive. Just put one of those in a keychain and voila, a perfect backup solution that does not need of internet access.

...it's not dumb if it (still) works. :^)

Restic with deja dupe gui

zfs snap and zfs send to an external or another server.

I use btrbk to send btrfs snapshots to a local NAS. Consistent backups with no downtime. The only annoyance (for me at least) is that both send and receive ends must use the same SELinux policy or labels won't match.

I use Duplicacy to encrypt and backup my data to OneDrive on a schedule. If Proton ever creates a Linux client for Drive, then I'll switch to that, but I'm not holding my breath.

I run Openmediavault and I backup using BorgBackup. Super easy to setup, use, and modify

Vorta + borgbase

The yearly subscription is cheap and fits my storage needs by quite some margin. Gives me peace of mind to have an off-site back up.

I also store my documents on Google Drive.

I use Pika backup, which uses borg backup under the hood. It's pretty good, with amazing documentation. Main issue I have with it is its really finicky and is kind of a pain to setup, even if it "just works" after that.

ZFS send / recieve and snapshots.

Most of my data is backed up to (or just stored on) a VPS in the first instance, and then I backup the VPS to a local NAS daily using rsnapshot (the NAS is just a few old hard drives attached to a Raspberry Pi until I can get something more robust). Very occasionally I'll back the NAS up to a separate drive. I also occasionally backup my laptop directly to a separate hard drive.

Not a particularly robust solution but it gives me some piece of mind. I would like to build a better NAS that can support RAID as I was never able to get it working with the Pi.

I use duplicity to a drive mounted off a Pi for local, tarsnap for remote. Both are command-line tools; tarsnap charges for their servers based on exact usage. (And thanks for the reminder; I'm due for another review of exactly what parts of which drives I'm backing up.)

Restic to Synology nas, Synology software for cloud backup.

Good ol' fashioned rsync once a day to a remote server with zfs with daily zfs snapshot (rsync.net). Very fast because it only need to send changed/new files, and saved my hide several times when I need to access deleted files or old version of some files from the zfs snapshots.

Get a Mac, use Time Machine. Go all in on the eco system. phone, watch, iPad, tv. I resisted for years but it's so good man and the apple silicon is just leaps beyond everything else.