I like pikabackup it’s based on borg
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
35 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
20935 readers
12 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, this is what I've found to be the best option. The encryption and deduplication is great.
I've tried alternatives but I've stuck with LuckyBackup even though there have not been any updates for a while:
- It's rsync based - which is updated
- It has masses of GUI options including various include/exclude options, pre- and post-commands, etc.
- It's simple - I can browse inside the backed files and see what is going on, or just restore back one or two files.
- It updates cron itself.
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.
Oh interesting! I might take a look at btrbk
Thanks. Heard a lot about it. Will check it.
This is what I do. Btrfs snapshots and use send/receive with my NAS.
This is the way !
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.
Agree. Should say 'best for you'. Cool thanks. I know of Vorta which I intended of using. Gonna read up on the other ones.
I started using Timeshift when it was included with a distro I was using and haven't had reason to shift away from it. Have already used it once to do a full restore.
Multiple. Locally I have Timeshift doing btrfs snapshots every so often. This is mostly to roll back to a snapshot if something breaks. I've never had to use it (and probably should).
I use Pika backup every once in a while for a local backup to an external drive. Mostly because it's easy to restore quickly.
I have duplicacy doing backups to a cloud provider. I used to use duplicati for this, and it was fine - although I didn't like that it seems to be forever in beta. I like that duplicacy can do deduplication between backups of different machines which most other solutions I've seen cannot. I like its selection of cloud providers vs Borg/Vorta and some others.
- Btrfs for local system backups based on snapshots
- Photoprism for photos
- Syncthing for other media
You will reconsider calling strategy a backup should the filesystem get corrupted for whatever reason.
I've tested my full system backup restore once with btrfs. Worked out fine.
Maybe Photoprism isn't a backup strategy, but Syncthing for sure is, because you can have multiple backup units in it.
I'm additionally use software RAID on one of devices, that receives Syncthing backups.
I don't have backups. :/
And I will regret it some day.
You very much will. It's easier than you'd think.
There are two kinds of people.
Those who make backups and those who will.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I've used Borg for years now. It's been rock solid. I test my backups regularly and have done several actual recoveries. I trust it with my data, which is the best thing I can say about backup software.
What is your strategie for testing? I am also using borg but i am not sure how to properly test it. Was thinking of a VM. But the data is way to much for it.
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'm curious - how much data are you backing up with that method and how frequently are you doing your backups? Doesn't sound like it would scale well, but I'm also wondering if maybe this is perfect and I've just been over thinking it.
load more comments
(11 replies)
ZFS snapshots and Borg(matic).
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.
Kopia has been working great for me as well. It's simple, versatile and reliable. I previously used Duplicati but kept running into jobs failing for no reason, backup configurations missing randomly and simple restores taking hours. It was a hot mess and I'm happy I switched.
I want to love kopia but the command line syntax feels unnatural to me. I don't know why either. For the whole month I test drove it, I had to look up every single time how to do something. Contrast this with restic which is less featureful in some ways but a few days in it felt like I was just using git.
I never used the command line with Kopia besides starting it up in server mode and used the web based GUI to configure, it was pretty simple to get everything setup that way. You may want to give it another try using Kopia in that mode.
My use case is for headless machines which makes it a no go in that regard unfortunately.
You can use the web ui remotely.
Personally I use it from command line, though, and my only complaint is that it's too easy to start a backup you didn't intend to.. Buut if you're careful about usong the kopia snapshot command then it's fine.
Oh I thought the webui was only for server mode.
I just quickly glanced through the manuals of both restic and kopia. I think my trouble with kopia is that its style feels kind of weird. I'm just not able to wrap my head around it well.
kopia snapshot create /dir is shorter but more confusing than restic -r repo backup /dir
load more comments
(1 replies)
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 just use rsync to backup my home folder to my NAS.
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 of actual beta) 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.
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.
automated with scripts
would you like to share those or do you have references for creating such scripts? this is on my to do list since years but I always struggle where to begin with.
They're very personalized to my setup, so they're not particularly useful in a general sense - I'd recommend something more like using this guide which seems to be pretty good: https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-use-rsync-remote-backup-linux-system
Learning bash has been great for me, it's helped a ton being able to automate so many different things even just like installing and configuring specific applications to work the way I want, etc
I think a script to manually run for manual backups plus a different script to run for automatic backups scheduled via cronjob is a great way to go.
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
I work with VMs mostly, so I go for Veeam B&R. The free tier allows you to backup 10 VMs or machines.
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.
I use FreeFileSync. It's the only GUI tool I found that let's me sync folders while omitting file deletions. It lets you create batch files from the GUI that I execute with crontab multiple times per day.
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 NixOS so all my system configuration is already saved in my NixOS configs, which I save on GitHub. For dotfiles that aren't managed by NixOS I use syncthing to sync them between my devices, but no real backup cause I can just remake them if I need to, and things like my Neovim and VSCode configs are managed by my NixOS configs so they're backed up as well.
You can take this to the extreme too by erasing your root partition each boot: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/
Using that method you isolate all important state on the system for backup with zfs send.
Yeah I have a full impermanence setup using tmpfs, which is really nice. I did it like on the NixOS wiki and it's been helpful for organizing my dotfiles and keeping track of all the random stuff that programs put everywhere.
I actually have all my stuff in a separate /stuff folder kinda by accident so my /home only has dotfiles and things like that.
I'm currently using TimeShift to backup my desktop onto an external hard drive (the why is because of how simple it is to use) and I'll be making a copy of anything I upload to my jellyfin server onto the external hard drive as well. I hope to eventually have a dedicated backup server and have a duplicate of it at a friend's house for offside backup too
view more: next ›