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I'm trying to find a good method of making periodic, incremental backups. I assume that the most minimal approach would be to have a Cronjob run rsync periodically, but I'm curious what other solutions may exist.

I'm interested in both command-line, and GUI solutions.

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[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 64 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

I too rawdog linux like a chad

[–] Ew0@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 year ago
[–] inex@feddit.de 33 points 1 year ago

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

[–] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] haroldstork@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

I use PikaBackup which I think uses Borg. Super good looking Gnome app that has worked for me.

[–] AES@lemmy.ronsmans.eu 5 points 1 year ago

Borgmatic is also a great option, cli only.

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[–] mariom@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago

It is a critical one. Maybe needs to be part of an FAQ with link to discussion.

[–] PlexSheep@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago

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

[–] kittyrunningnoise@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] auv_guy@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

I also use it. Big benefit is also that you don‘t need a special software to access your backup.

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[–] elscallr@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] jack667@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

[–] Jajcus@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

Restic does not need rclone and can use many remote storage services directly. I do restic backups directly to Backblaze.

[–] thegreenguy@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

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".

[–] NoXPhasma@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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[–] itchy_lizard@feddit.it 7 points 1 year ago

rsync + backblaze B2. Bafkblaze is stupid cheap.

Cost is about $10 per year.

[–] GlowHuddy@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

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

[–] jfx@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Jajcus@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Rootiest@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I really like kopia

[–] okda@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

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

[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] HarriPotero@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] j12345@boulder.ly 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Jajcus@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago

Someone asking for Linux backup solution may prefer to avoid Apple 'ecosystem'.

[–] gamebuster@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Time Machine is not a backup, it is unreliable. I've had corrupted time machine backups and its backups are non-portable: You can only read the backups using an Apple machine. Apple Silicon is also not leaps beyond everything else, a 7000-series AMD chip will trade blows on performance per watt given the same power target. (source: I measured it, 60 watt power limit on a 7950X will closely match a M1 ultra given the same 60 watts of power)

Sure their laptops are tuned better out of the box and have great battery life, but that's not because of the Apple Silicon. Apple had good battery life before, even when their laptops had the same Intel chip as any other laptop. Why? Because of software.

Like before, their new M-chips are nothing special. Apple Silicon chips are great, but so are other modern chips. Apple Silicon is not "leaps beyond everything else".

If you look past their shiny fanboy-bait chips, you realize you pay **huge ** markups on RAM and storage. Apple's RAM and storage isn't anything special, but they're a lot more expensive than any other high-end RAM and storage modules, and it's not like their RAM or storage is better because, again, an AMD chip can just use regular RAM modules and an NVME SSD and it will match the M-chip performance given the same power target. Except you can replace the RAM modules and the SSD on the AMD chipset for reasonable prices.

In the end, a macbook is a great product and there's no other laptop that really gets close to its performance given its size. But that's it, that's where Apple's advantage ends. Past their ultra-light macbooks, you get overpriced hardware, crazy expensive upgrades, with an OS that isn't better, more reliable or more stable than Windows 11 (source: I use macOS and Windows 11 daily). You can buy a slightly thicker laptop (and it will still be thin and light) with replacable RAM and SSD and it will easily match the performance of the magic M1 chip with only a slight reduction in potential battery life. But guess what: If you actually USE your laptop for anything, the battery life of any laptop will quickly drop to 2-3 hours at best.

And that's just laptops. If you want actual work done, you get a desktop, and for the price of any Apple desktop you can easily get any PC to outperform it. In some cases, you can buy a PC to outperform the Apple desktop AND buy a macbook for on the go, and still have money left over. Except for power consumption ofcourse, but who cares about power consumption on a work machine? Only Apple fanboys care about that, because that's the only thing they got going for them. My time is more expensive than my power bill.

[–] huskypenguin@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

Time Machine is such a neglected product. Time Shift is worlds beyond it.

[–] HughJanus@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

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).

[–] Tiuku@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] akash_rawal@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I'm genuinely curious. Why do people like btrfs over zfs? Btrfs seems very much so "not ready for prime time".

[–] EddyBot@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

btrfs is included in the linux kernel, zfs is not on most distros
the tiny chance that an externel kernel module borking with a kernel upgrade happens sometimes and is probably scary enough for a lot of people

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[–] akash_rawal@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Features necessary for most btrfs use cases are all stable, plus btrfs is readily available in Linux kernel whereas for zfs you need additional kernel module. The availability advantage of btrfs is a big plus in case of a disaster. i.e. no additional work is required to recover your files.

(All the above only applies if your primary OS is Linux, if you use Solaris then zfs might be better.)

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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.

[–] KitchenNo2246@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] donio@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] vox@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] useless@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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_am_hiding@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] rodbiren@midwest.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] podagro@reddthat.com 3 points 1 year ago

timeshift with system files and manually my home folder

[–] shaulliv@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I use Rclone which has both an WEBUI and CLI.

[–] darcy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

dont keep anything u would be upset to lose /s

[–] gabriele97@lemmy.g97.top 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

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.

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