Linux

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• Restic client
• Restic REST server
• https://github.com/rbuchberger/res-man + systemd timers or cron to configure & run restic nightly
• healthchecks.io for monitoring
• ntfy.sh for notifications

Destinations:

• Local raspberry pi with external hdd, running restic REST server
• RAID 1 NAS at parents' house, connected via tailscale, also running restic REST

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.

Firstly, for my dotfiles, I use home-manager. I keep the config on my git server and in theory I can pull it down and set up a system the way I like it.

In terms of backups, I use Pika to backup my home directory to my hard disk every day, so I can, in theory, pull back files I delete.

I also push a core selection of my files to my server using Pika, just in case my house burns down. Likewise, I pull backups from my server to my desktop (again with Pika) in case Linode starts messing me about.

I also have a 2TiB ssd I keep in a strongbox and some cloud storage which I push bigger things to sporadically.

I also take occasional data exports from online services I use. Because hey, Google or Discord can ban you at any time for no reason. :P

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Timeshift for configs to a locally attached drive. Home partition to cloud with rsync