• Offline Backup on 2 separate HDD/SSD
• Backup on HDD within my desktop pc
• Backup offsite with restic to Hetzner Storage Box

I use external drive for my important data and if my system is borked (which never happen to me) I just reinstall the OS

Borg Backup, whenever I feel like it - usually monthly.

I have a server with a RAID-1 array, that makes daily, weekly, and monthly read only btrfs snapshots. The whole thing (sans snapshots) is sync’d with syncthing to two rPi’s in two different geographic locations.

I know neither raid nor syncthing are “real” backup solutions, but with so many copies of the files living in so many locations (in addition to my phone, laptop, etc.) I’m reasonably confident its a decent solution.

• daily important stuff (job stuff, Documents folder, Renoise mods) is kept synced between laptop, desktop and home server via Syncthing. A vimwiki additionally also syncs with the phone. Sync happens only when on home network.

• the rest of the laptop and desktop I’ll roll into a tar backup every now and then with a quick bash alias. The tar files also get synced onto home server’s big file system (2 TB ssd) via Syncthing. Home server backs itself up on it’s own once a week.

• clever thing is that the 2 TB ssd replaced an old 2 TB spinning disk. I kept the old disk and set up a systemd thing that keeps it spun down, but starts and mounts it once a week and rsyncs the changes to the ssd over, then unmounts it so that it sleeps again for a week. That old drive is likely to serve for years still with this frugal use.

My KVM hosts use “virsh backup begin” to make full backups nightly.

All machines, including the KVM hosts and laptops, use rsync with --link-dest to create daily incremental versioned backups on my main backup server.

The main backup server pushes client-side encrypted backups which include the latest daily snapshot for every system to rsync.net via Borg.

I also have 2 DASs with 2 22TB encrypted drives in each. One of these is plugged into the backup server while the other one sits powered off in a drawer in my desk at work. The main backup server pushes all backups to this DAS weekly and I swap the two DASs ~monthly so the one in my desk at work is never more than a month or so out of date.

Borg to a NAS.

500GB of that NAS is “special” so I then rsync that to a 500GB old laptop hdd, of which is is duplicated again to another 500GB old laptop hdd.

Same 500GB rsync’d to Cloud Server.

My conclusion after researching this a while ago is that the good options are Borg and Restic. Both give you incremental backups with cheap timewise snapshots. They are quite similar to each other, and I don’t know of a compelling reason to pick one over the other.

Backup? What?

There’s nothing saved on my system I couldn’t afford to lose. All my work stuff is saved in Google Drive for better or worse. I have a few small files in a personal Proton Drive that I backup manually. I wipe my own system a few times a year and I rarely ever save anything first. Honestly very refreshing to live your life like that. Other than my cat, pretty much all my possessions could disappear tomorrow and I’d get over it pretty quickly.

i do backups of my home folder with Vorta, tha uses borg in the backend. I never tried restic, but borg is the first incremental backup utility i tried that doesnt increase the backup size when i move or rename a file. I was using backintime before to backup 500gb on a 750gb drive and if I moved 300gb to a different folder, it would try to copy those 300gb again onto the backup drive and fail for lack of storage, while borg handles it beautifully.

as an offsite solution, i use syncthing to mirror my files to a pc at my fathers house that is turned on just once in a while to save power and disc longevity.

I’m curious, is there a reason why noone uses deja-dup? I use it with an external SSD on Ubuntu and (receently) Mint, where it comes pre-installed, and did not encounter Problems.

I recently switched to Kopia for my offsite backup solution.

It’s apparently one of the faster options, and it can be set up so that the files of the differential backups are handled by a repository server on the offsite end, so file management doesn’t need to happen over the network at a snails pace.

The result is a way to maintain frequent full backups of my nextcloud instance, with almost no downtime.

Nextcloud only goes into maintenance mode for the duration of a postgres database dump, after which the actual file system backup occurs using a temporary btrfs snapshot, containing a frozen filesystem at the time of the database dump.

My work flow is pretty similar to yours:

For my desktop and laptops: systemd timer and service that backups every 15 minutes using restic to my NAS.

For my NAS : daily backup using restic + ZFS snapshots.

All restic backups are then uploaded daily to Backblaze B2.

Since most of the machines I need to backup are VMs, I do it by the means of hypervisor. I’d use borg scheduled in crontab for physical ones.