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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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restic to a local server and to cloud storage. it varies by device, but usually just everything in /home/. The rest of the operating system should be reproducible, whether through images, ansible, nix, or guix, given the information in /home/.
scheduling is done through systemd, usually (or the non-systemd equivalent). I use BackBlaze now, but I switch around occasionally. restic has policy based snapshot removal, and a prune option.
I use Bluebuild to create a reproducible system, plus a post-install script to handle other post-install tasks such as setting up initial preferences.
Also Vorta to backup files and settings to external HD, plus OneDrive Linux client to sync files and settings to cloud.
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!
For files are in git (using stow to recreate) and my documents folder is syncing to nextcloud (selfhosted) and this also to my laptop. This is of course not a "Backup" per se more a "multiple copies" but it gets the job done and also firs my workflow. To be happy with that I want to set up an offsite backup of data from my server to a NAS in my parents place but right now that's just a to-do I haven't put any work in yet ;)
I use OneDrive. I know people will hate but it’s cheap and works on everything (well, it takes a third party tool on Linux). If I care about it it goes in OneDrive, otherwise I don’t need it that much.
May I ask why you prefer that over Google Drive, or others such as Dropbox or Mega? I used it extensively when I used Windows, but that's been several years.
may I ask which third-party tool you use? i'm using onedriver and it's pretty unreliable in my experience
Bareos. Its a newer Form of bacula and is a realworkhorse.
.dotfiles on github
Big/critical files on an external HD
simple as
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
For system files/configuration on my machines, timeshift set to run once a week.
For family photos and shared files, I built a pair of SFTP servers made from old HP thin-client PCs at two different geographic locations which automatically sync to each other once a day via cron job using vsftpd and lftp. Each one has both an NVMe and SATA SSD which run in a software RAID 1 configuration.
For any other files, a second local server also using vsftpd and two SSDs in USB enclosures. I manually back them up using rsync on an irregular basis.