Using borg backup, just because there are some nice frontends for the gnome ecosystem (when I am using gnome, I love to use gnome apps), and it has a nice cmd for scripting when using something else (using it on servers)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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I use restic. For local backups, Timeshift.
Seconded, I use restic with a remote blob storage and works nicely
There is no such thing as the objectively best solution. Each tool has advantages and disadvantages. And every user has different preferences and requirements.
Personally, I am using Borg for years. And I have had to restore data several times, which has worked every time.
In addition to Borg, you can also look at Borgmatic. This wrapper extends the functionality and makes some things easier.
And if you want to use a graphical user interface, you can have a look at Vorta or Pika.
Agree. Should say 'best for you'. Cool thanks. I know of Vorta which I intended of using. Gonna read up on the other ones.
Kopia has served me great. I back up to my local Ceph S3 storage and then keep a second clone of that on a raid.
Kopiahas good performance and miltiple hosts can back up tp it concurrently while preserving deduplication -- unlike borgbackup.
Kopia has been working great for me as well. It's simple, versatile and reliable. I previously used Duplicati but kept running into jobs failing for no reason, backup configurations missing randomly and simple restores taking hours. It was a hot mess and I'm happy I switched.
I want to love kopia but the command line syntax feels unnatural to me. I don't know why either. For the whole month I test drove it, I had to look up every single time how to do something. Contrast this with restic which is less featureful in some ways but a few days in it felt like I was just using git.
I never used the command line with Kopia besides starting it up in server mode and used the web based GUI to configure, it was pretty simple to get everything setup that way. You may want to give it another try using Kopia in that mode.
My use case is for headless machines which makes it a no go in that regard unfortunately.
You can use the web ui remotely.
Personally I use it from command line, though, and my only complaint is that it's too easy to start a backup you didn't intend to.. Buut if you're careful about usong the kopia snapshot command then it's fine.
Oh I thought the webui was only for server mode.
I just quickly glanced through the manuals of both restic and kopia. I think my trouble with kopia is that its style feels kind of weird. I'm just not able to wrap my head around it well.
kopia snapshot create /dir is shorter but more confusing than restic -r repo backup /dir
I've been using Kopia on my desktop computer for a few years now to do cloud backups. It's generally working well and I haven't found anything else with the same combination of features yet.
That said, kopia-ui is still a bit finicky and I've managed to bork a repo beyond repair a few times (e.g. once because my cloud provider account ran out of space, leading to some kind of inconsistent state) and there are some oddities, like the regular "periodic maintenance" (it's a bit weird that it's needed in the first place) randomly failing or taking forever.
I use btrfs snapshots and btrbk
btrfs is a great filesystem and btrbk complements it easily. Switching between snapshots is also really easy if something goes wrong and you need to restore.
Archwiki docs for btrfs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Incremental_backup_to_external_drive
Oh interesting! I might take a look at btrbk
Thanks. Heard a lot about it. Will check it.
This is the way !
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I just use rsync to backup my home folder to my NAS.
I don't have backups. :/
And I will regret it some day.
I use github for code so that's backed up though.
There are two kinds of people.
Those who make backups and those who will.
Multiple. Locally I have Timeshift doing btrfs snapshots every so often. This is mostly to roll back to a snapshot if something breaks. I've never had to use it (and probably should).
I use Pika backup every once in a while for a local backup to an external drive. Mostly because it's easy to restore quickly.
I have duplicacy doing backups to a cloud provider. I used to use duplicati for this, and it was fine - although I didn't like that it seems to be forever in beta. I like that duplicacy can do deduplication between backups of different machines which most other solutions I've seen cannot. I like its selection of cloud providers vs Borg/Vorta and some others.
I use my own scripts with rsync etc, I don't back up my OS itself since I have installing it automated with scripts as well. I just back up specific things I need with my scripts.
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- Btrfs for local system backups based on snapshots
- Photoprism for photos
- Syncthing for other media
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I work with VMs mostly, so I go for Veeam B&R. The free tier allows you to backup 10 VMs or machines.
I use NixOS so all my system configuration is already saved in my NixOS configs, which I save on GitHub. For dotfiles that aren't managed by NixOS I use syncthing to sync them between my devices, but no real backup cause I can just remake them if I need to, and things like my Neovim and VSCode configs are managed by my NixOS configs so they're backed up as well.
You can take this to the extreme too by erasing your root partition each boot: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/
Using that method you isolate all important state on the system for backup with zfs send.
Yeah I have a full impermanence setup using tmpfs, which is really nice. I did it like on the NixOS wiki and it's been helpful for organize my dotfiles and keeping track of all the random stuff that programs put everywhere.
I actually have all my stuff in a separate /stuff folder kinda by accident so my /home only has dotfiles and things like that.
For my Ubuntu desktop, I use the builtin backup tool to take backups on my NAS. For my homelab, I have everything running on Proxmox and my Proxmox backup server takes care of the homelab backups.
Just a reminder. Consider and test your restore process as well. Backups without restore testing are kind of questionable. Also think how the restore will go. Do you want to do a bare metal restore, or will you just reinstall, and restore certain things for example. Lot of these backup methods will not get a true bare metal restore set, nor can file system backups be "perfect" if they are done on a running system. Databases and things like cryptfs mounts for example can be problematic for example. Nor do all tools necessarily backup the full structure of the file system.
Not saying these are always issues, just be aware of them.
I just use a script on an systemd timer. Well two scripts on two timers really - one running daily, one weekly for different data. It's just a bunch of rsync commands copying folders to an hdd in my system and I reroute the output into a simple log file, mainly to verify if it ran at all. I am a bit paranoid about that. I can also run it manually whenever I want.
Oh and some of the data I also rsync again to a smb cloud drive from Hetzner.
I do not keep multiple versions and I delete remote files that have been deleted locally. It's just a 1:1 copy.
Oh and I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed so I have auto configured btrfs snapshots. Though I have not needed them yet and could not even say how I can use those. I figure that out once I need them.
What problem are you trying to solve? Please think about that, and about your backup strategy, before you decide on any specific tools.
For example, here are several scenarios that I guard against in my backup strategy:
- Accidentally delete a file, I want to recover it quickly (snapshots);
- Entire drive goes kablooie, I want my system to continue running without downtime (RAID)
- User data drive goes kablooie, I want to recover (many many options)
- Root drive goes kablooie, I want to recover (baremetal recovery tools)
- House burns down or computer is damaged/stolen (offsite backups)
I've been using restic. It has built-in dedup & encryption and supports both local and remote storage. I'm using it to back up to a local restic-server (pointing to a USB drive) and Backblaze B2.
Restores for single or small sets of files is easy: restic -r $REPO mount /mnt Then browse through the filesystem view of your snapshots and copy just like any other filesystem.
I've tried alternatives but I've stuck with LuckyBackup even though there have not been any updates for a while:
- It's rsync based - which is updated
- It has masses of GUI options including various include/exclude options, pre- and post-commands, etc.
- It's simple - I can browse inside the backed files and see what is going on, or just restore back one or two files.
- It updates cron itself.
I've used borg for a while and like it a lot. I would say your best option for pure linux is borg+borgmatic/vorta just because borg is battle-tested.
If you run any other OSs and don't mind a relative newcomer, I've found kopia to be easy to recommend to my windows friends. At this point kopia has been around long enough (~4 years of actual beta) that I think it's safe to trust its integrity with personal data. It has all the important features from borg in a cross-platform solution, so it's also a viable alternative for borg on linux if you don't like borg's frontends for whatever reason.
I started using Timeshift when it was included with a distro I was using and haven't had reason to shift away from it. Have already used it once to do a full restore.
I am old school. I just use GNU Tar with the Pax format and multiple external detachable encypted hard drives. Reason is it is simple and a well known tool that is very common with a standard archive format.
I'm curious - how much data are you backing up with that method and how frequently are you doing your backups? Doesn't sound like it would scale well, but I'm also wondering if maybe this is perfect and I've just been over thinking it.
There is not a size limit. Lot of these other methods actually use GNU Tar behind the scenes anyway. More then that GNU tar has been used for decades for this purpose. Pull out any Unix book from 2 decades ago and you will see "tar", "cpio", and "dump/restore" as the way. The new tool out there is Pax and in fact GNU Tar supports the new "pax" format. Moreover GNU Tar with Pax format can backup almost full disk structure including hard links, ACLs, and extended attributes which a lot of tools do not do. It is still useful to archive some things at a lower level like your partition table, and boot blocks of course. You also have to decide what run-level (such as rescue) you want to archive in, and/or what services you should stop, or provide separate to file system dumps for depending on your system. Databases, and things like ecryptfs take some special thought (thought it does for any tool). It is also good to do test restores to verify your disaster plan.
I use tar on many systems. My workstation is about 1TB of data. Backup is about 11 hours though I think it could be faster if I disabled compression (I currently use the standard gzip compression which is not optimal). I think the process is CPU bound by the compression at the moment. Going to uncompressed or using parallel gzip at level 2 is probably the fastest you can do and should really speed things up by 4X or more. I have played with this some for my wife and her raw backup is a lot faster now. My wife uses USB 3 external drives specifically plugged into USB 3 ports (the one with the SS symbol and the blue interior), and with a USB 3 related cable. I use 6TB naked SATA drives I insert into a hot mount enclosure and store in storage boxes. My backup system can theoretically do incrementals too, but it has some issues since I have moved to BTRFS so I do not use that at the moment. Did always use before. I have an idea how to fix, but need to debug and test incrementals now.
How often: I backup monthly. When my incrementals were working I use to do it weekly or whenever I got nervous. Other option for the BTRFS file systems would be to use their native backup tools. Not sure though, I like to use generic stuff. Lot to be said for generic.
Big downside of tar is the mind numbing man page. Getting the options correct takes some real thought. You also have to be comfortable with the shell and Bash scripting. Big upside you can customize exactly what you want.
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I'm currently using TimeShift to backup my desktop onto an external hard drive (the why is because of how simple it is to use) and I'll be making a copy of anything I upload to my jellyfin server onto the external hard drive as well. I hope to eventually have a dedicated backup server and have a duplicate of it at a friend's house for offside backup too
I only have backups of my important files, encrypted and synced through rclone.
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