I don’t mean system files, but your personal and work files. I have been using Mint for a few years, I use Timeshift for system backups, but archived my personal files by hand. This got me curious to see what other people use. When you daily drive Linux what are your preferred tools to keep backups? I have thousands of pictures, family movies, documents, personal PDFs, etc. that I don’t want to lose. Some are cloud backed but rather haphazardly. I would like to use a more systematic approach and use a tool that is user friendly and easy to setup and program.
Syncthing. I don’t want to invest into a NAS and put some load into my already greedy power bill, so I chose something decentralized. Syncthing really just works like Torrent but for your personal files: Whatever happens on the computer, also does on the phone, and on the laptop. Each have about 1TB of space and 3 times redundancy? Hell yea buddy dig in.
But that’s not really backup, is it? It just synchronizes folders.
Yes but it is a automated backup solution if you want it to. I just put important stuff in the Syncthing folder and rest assured its also on the phone incase the computers SSD caughs fire.
I think you are confusing synchronizing with backup. If you delete a file in your Syncthing folder and the deletion gets synchronized, that file is lost. If you do the same in a folder backed up by, say, Borg, you can roll back the deletion and restore the file.
I may be wrong about Syncthing, though. I haven’t used it yet, but will probably use it in the future. Just not for backup :)
This is true if you leave it at defaults but I make use of file versioning. When you flick that one on, files that are otherwise replaced or deleted will actually move to a offline .stversions folder. That is very vital I must say in case a host catches some encryptor malware eheh
I didn’t know that was a possibility. Still, it seem kind of not really what Syncthing is intended for. I mean, they even state it in their FAQ:
No. Syncthing is not a great backup application because all changes to your files (modifications, deletions, etc.) will be propagated to all your devices. You can enable versioning, but we encourage you to use other tools to keep your data safe from your (or our) mistakes.
I just found out about
syncthingyesterday and it really is superb, it’s so easy to use even crossplatform.unisonis another syncing tool that I like, I find it better for bidirectional syncing
BorgBackup
BorgBackup is backup done right. Compressed, deduplicated, encrypted. After the initial backup, it takes only a few minutes to do a new backup. Need a specific file you deleted last week? Just mount a previous back and get the file back. It is that simple. Love it.
Git for projects, NAS for 3D printing stuff, mods for games and unofficial game translations, Google Photos for photos (looking to migrate away from that when I have time). I don’t much care about anything else.
Git as backup?! Ok…
Git for projects
I assume the original comment meant code based projects, for which git, if repo is pushed to a remote, is a very sane choice.
Yeah, git without LFS isn’t optimal for non-text files.
Yep, that’s what I meant. If it’s a public project, it’s on my GitHub, if it’s a private one, it’s on my private GitLab instance.
Meaning that as long as you’re regularly committing your work to Github/Gitlab/wherever, you don’t need to backup your source directory.
I am using Borg for years. So far, the tool has not let me down. I store the backups on external hard drives that are only used for backups. In addition, I save really important data at rsync.net and at Hetzer in a storage box. Which is not a problem because Borg automatically encrypts locally and for decryption in my case you need a password and a key file.
Generally speaking, you should always test whether you can restore data from a backup. No matter which tool you use. Only then you have a real backup. And an up-to-date backup should always additionally be stored off-site (cloud, at a friend’s or relative’s house, etc.). Because if the house burns down, the external hard drive with the backups next to the computer is not much use.
By the way, I would advise against using just rsync because, as the name suggests, rsync only synchronizes, so you don’t have multiple versions of a file. Which can be useful if you only notice later that a file has become defective at some point.
Borg backup
Restic. Borg also great.
Borg backup (via Pika Backup (Libadwaita gnome app) frontend) to one of my physical drive and also to borgbase.com (free tier 10 gb free)
Restic to Backblaze B2. Ez.
I do this as well. Easy and inexpensive.
Duplicacy
Restic in the homelab and Veeam at work. I’m pretty happy with both!
An external hard drive works 100%. And relying on .dotfiles to redownload the whole thing back.
…I mean, it takes like less than 3 minutes to redownload and 5 reconfiguring everything manually, so eh.
Vorta (Borg GUI). It’s simple to use.
I use Pika and Timeshift.
@dustyData I have hundreds of thousands of files that need to be backed up locally and in the cloud. I use either Vorta or Pika. Both are interfaces for Borg. Easy to use and their deduplication feature manages to save a lot of diskspace. I tried so many backup solutions and none worked as reliably.
I use Raspberry Pi 4 with connected external HDD and installed Nextcloud
