Backups

[rejectconvenience]

Alright Linux friends, what's your backup regimen look like? I am coming from macOS and Time Machine, and I haven't been able to find a solution that's similar. I have a NAS I'd like to send the backups to, there should be plenty of storage on there for now... actually, that might not be true anymore.. this is a 4TB SSD in this computer so I might need to rethink things... But I do need a good backup solution, so what do y'all use?

[Crazyroostereye]

Files I usually want to keep are directly written to my Nextcloud or are in Synced folders in the Nextcloud or in Git repos on remotes. But I do also use the ZFS file system which makes periodic immutable Snapshots to which I can restore to when stuff happens, this is not a Backup tho.

But a tool I used to use for Backups was Pika Backup, as far as I understand Time Machine, they are similar. It's based on Borg backup a standard Backup system and allows backing up to remotes (SSH/SFTP/SMB) or local Locations. It has encryption functionality, an integrity check and periodic Automatic Backups.

I highly recommend it.
Another tool I heard about, but never used is Timeshift.

[drmollytov]

I have an external hard drive I back up my computer drives to once a month. It gets copied to a second external hard drive four times a year. That second drive lives at my parents' house. The first one lives in my fire safe.

I just don't have much in the way of files, so I don't find this inconvenient. Really critical stuff also gets backed up to a 256GB thumb drive that also lives in the fire safe. My current projects are always in CryptPad, so I don't worry too much about them.

I know I could pay for a cloud service, but I don't want to leave my data on someone else's computer.

[zonk]

I have a script on my main PC which uses rsync to back up my files to a NAS running TrueNAS CORE. This script has a cron job to run nightly. An hour later, another rsync task runs on the NAS to back up to two remote NASes I have strategically placed at the houses of friends and family. The local NAS communicates with the remote systems via VPN which is hosted at my house. I also have an external HDD that I manually back up to once a month just in case my local NAS explodes and I need my files without having to slowly download them from a remote NAS.

[nekiwo]

3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies, 2 mediums, 1 off-site

what i do:
- 1 copy on main computer
- 1 copy on local SMB server/desktop
- 1 copy on unlimited school google drive

no RAID, no special NAS image, no WD Red, simple but effective.

[Stefen_Maxwell]

My backup routine is to basically store my home directory on a hard drive every time I distro hop. It is not ideal.