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.

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)

I use restic. For local backups, Timeshift.

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.

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.

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

Of course you'd still want a remote location to backup to. You can use an encrypted volume with cloud storage. So google drive, etc all work.

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.

• Btrfs for local system backups based on snapshots
• Photoprism for photos
• Syncthing for other media

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 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'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?) 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.

Rsync is great but if you want snapshots and file history rsnapshot works pretty well. It's based on rsync but for every sync it creates shortcuts for existing files and only copies changes and new files. It saves space and remains transparent for the user. FreeFileSync is also amazing

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.

I've tried alternatives but I've stuck with LuckyBackup even though there have not been any updates for a while:

1. It's rsync based - which is updated
2. It has masses of GUI options including various include/exclude options, pre- and post-commands, etc.
3. It's simple - I can browse inside the backed files and see what is going on, or just restore back one or two files.
4. It updates cron itself.

I'm currently working on a disaster recovery plan using fsarchiver. I have very limited experience with it so far, but it had the features and social proof I was looking for.

I have so far used it to create offline filesystem backups of two volumes, one was LUKS encrypted (has to be manually "opened" with cryptsetup).

It can backup live filesystems which was important to me.

It's early days for my experience with this, but I'm sure others have used it and might chime in.

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.

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.