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I really make backups only a few times. I have the configuration files of my systems on my GitHub and Codeberg. The rest, I don't need; the only things I keep are books and music that I download from the internet, which I have on a 1TB external hard drive.
When I have made a backup for a specific reason, I have done it with rsync. It's a tool that works quite well and is for the command line.
The only thing I use as a backup is a Live CD that's mounted to a USB thumb drive.
I used to use Timeshift but the one time I needed it, it didn't work for some reason. It also had a problem of making my PC temporarily unusable while it was making a backup, so I didn't enable it when I had to reinstall Linux Mint.
Same, Timeshift let me down one time when I needed it. I still use it though, and I'm afraid to upgrade Mint because I don't want to set my system again for of the upgrade fails to keep my configuration and Timeshift fails to take me back
Timeshift for the system, works perfectly, if you screw up the system, bad update for instance just start it, and you'll be back up running in less than ten minutes. Simple Cron backups for data, documents etc, just in case you delete a folder, document, image etc . Both of these options to a second internal HD
Nightly rsync to two NAS boxes in the house (TrueNAS Scale and a Synology). Docs go in NextCloud, hosted on a VM in my basement, which is also backed up to the Synology by Proxmox. Also backing up my main machine (Pop!_OS) and my wife’s laptop (ThinkPad E595, also Pop!_OS) using Spideroak One.
I leverage btrfs or ZFS snapshots. I take rolling system level snapshots on a schedule (daily, weekly, monthly and separately before any package upgrades or installs) and user data snapshots every couple of hours. Then I use btrbk to sync those snapshots to an external drive at least once a week. When I have all of my networking gear and home services setup I also sync all of this to storage on my NAS. Any hosts on the network keep rolling snapshots stored on the NAS as well.
Important data also gets shoveled into a B2 bucket and/or Google drive if I need to be able to access it from a phone.
I keep snapshots small by splitting data up into well defined subvolumes, anything that can be reacquired from the cloud (downloads, package caches, steam libraries, movies, music, etc) isn't included in the backup strategy. If I download something and it's hard to find or important I move it out of downloads and into a location that is covered by my backups.
When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.
I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid's computer.
I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache, and Steam's data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don't want backed up.
I use the "exclude caches" option in the Borg "create archive" settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/ directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages' tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*
I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don't need backups for anything outside my home directory.
Not only because third world issues, but because I like adrenaline, I don't have any backup strategy but an old external HDD where I haven't copied stuff since 2018.
When I could afford a new PC and tried to rsync my data from my old crappy laptop, much of it was lost.
That being said, I had a backup strategy back in the day that was burning CDs. I used to have a second HDD (a IDE one) but they were so freaking bad all of them went bad after a year or so, so I have like 3 or 4 of them stored without any chance to recover their data.
After having recently restored some stuff from an aging external hdd, i'm seriously considering getting a few dvdr discs and burning the important things every now and then.
I know they don't last forever either, but - just as a random example that has definitely never happened to me hahaha - you can drop them from a height of 3 feet and still get files off them!
Keep everything on Nextcloud and back that up via Proxmox Backup Server.
Nuke and pave takes me less time to reconfigure Plasma and install NC client than bothering to back anything up directly.
Pika Backup for /home/ to an external drive. It's an automatic solution with a simple GUI that serves as a front end to Borg iirc. Lets you easily browse and mount old backups. Anything outside of my actual personal files can be recreated or restored trivially, so I don't care to back them up.
I also have a manual dump of /etc/ but i change it so infrequently that it doesn't really need looking after.
Software & Services:
Destinations:
I've been meaning to set up a drive rotation for the local backup so I always have one offline in case of ransomware, but I haven't gotten to it.
Edit: For the backup set I back up pretty much everything. I'm not paying per gig, though.
I use syncthing to sync almost everything across my computer, laptop (occasional usage), server (RAID1), old laptop (powered up once every month or so), and a few other devices (that only get a small subset of my data, though). On the computer, laptop, and server, I have btrfs snapshots (snapper). Overall, this works very well, I always have 4+ copies of my data in 2+ geographical locations.
.dotfiles on github
Big/critical files on an external HD
simple as
All of my servers make local dumps of their databases and config files to directories owned by unprivileged users. This includes file paths, permissions, and ownerships (so I know how to put them back).
My primary research server at home uses rsync to pull copies of those local backups from my servers.
My primary research server uses Restic to make a daily incremental backup to Backblaze's B2 service.
For my home server, I use Restic and a cronjob to weekly take snapshots of all my services. It then gets synced to a Backblaze B2 bucket (at $6/TB/mo). It's pretty neat, only saving the difference between the previous and current snapshot, removes older snapshots, and encrypts everything.
I have my important folders synced to my Nextcloud and create nightly snapshots of that to a different drive using borg.
One thing I still need to do, is offsite encrypted backups using rsync.
restic -> Wasabi, automated with shell script and cron. Uses an include list to tell it what paths to back up.
Script has Pushover credentials to send me backup alerts. Parses restic log to tell me how much was backed up, removed, success/failure of backup, and current repo size.
To be added: a periodic restore of a random file to have its hash compared to the current version of the file (will happen right after backup, unlikely to have changed in my workload), which will be subsequently deleted, and alert sent letting me know how the restore test went.
I sync important files to s3 from a folder with awscli. Dot files and projects are in a private git repos. That's it.
If I maintained a server, I would do something more sophisticated, but installation is so dead simple these days that I could get a daily driver in working order very quickly.
If I feel like it, I might use DD to clone my drive and put in on a hard drive. Usually I don't back up, though.
You have loads of options but you need to also start from ... "what if". Work out how important your data really is. Take another look and ask the kids and others if they give a toss. You might find that no one cares about your photo collection in which case if your phone dies ... who cares? If you do care then sync them to a PC or laptop.
Perhaps take a look at this - https://www.veeam.com/products/free/linux.html its free for a few systems.
Dotfiles are handled by GNU Stow and git. I have this on all my devices.
Projects like in git.
Media is periodically rsynced from my server to an external drive.
Been meaning to put all my docker-composes into git as well...
I don't back up too much else.
Pendrive for the important stuff, paper for the really important stuff and brain for everything else.
My backup is begging my computer to implode so I can experience the sweet relief of getting offline.
But also I use external discs and make copies of important files I can't recreate. Don't care too much about config as I am happy enough to distro hop and set things up anew.
I built a backup server out of my old desktop, running Ubuntu and ZFS
I have a dataset for each of my computers and i back them up to the corresponding datasets in the zfs pool on the server semi-regularly. The zfs pool has enough disks for some redundancy, so i can handle occasional drive failures. My other computers run arbitrary filesystems (ext4, btrfs, rarely ntfs)
the only problem with my current setup is that if there is file degradation on my workstation that i dont notice, it might get backed up to the server by mistake. then a degraded file might overwrite a non-degraded backup. to avoid this, i generally dont overwrite files when i backup. since 90% of my data is pictures, it's not a big deal since they dont change
Someday i'd like to set up proxmox and virtualize everything, and i'd also like to set up something offsite i could zfs-send to as a second backup
Timeshift for configs to a locally attached drive. Home partition to cloud with rsync