Linux

I rsync ~/ to a USB nub. A no brainer.

I want to say I'm glad you asked this and thank you for asking. In this day and age there are a lot of valid concerns for privacy and anonymity and the result is that people do not share how their system(s) work, not openly or very often. I'm still fairly new to Linux (3.5 years) and at times, I feel like I am doing everything wrong and that there is probably a better way. Posts like these help me learn about possible improvements or mistakes I might have made.

I previously used Vorta with Borgbackup locally, automatically backing up my Home (sans things like .cache and .mozilla) to a secondary internal drive every other day. I also would manually back up a smaller set of important documents (memes and porn #joke) to a USB flash drive, to keep on my person, which also would be copied across several cloud storage providers (dropbox, mega, proton), depending on how much space their free versions provided, with items removed according to how much I trusted the provider.

Then I built a new system. In the process of setting it all up, I had a few hiccups. It took longer than I expected to have a stable system. That was over a year ago (stat / ...Birth: 2024-02-05 04:20:53...) and I still haven't gotten around to setting up any backup system on it. I want to rethink my old solution and this post is useful for learning about the options available. It's also a reminder to get it done before it is too late. Where I live, tornado season in starting. I lost a lot in 2019 after my city had 4 tornados in one day.

I use BorgBackup with Vorta for a GUI, and I keep the 3-2-1 backup rule for important stuff (IE: 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 off-site.)

My kmymoney file goes on an old compact flash memory card.

My home directory (including that file), /etc, databases, and a few other things get backed up weekly on to a USB stick.

Media raid array is automatically backed up to a large drive in another computer each evening. (The raid5 array isn't that large. It was when I built it, but now I can buy a single drive that is nearly as large as the array...)

Pictures are backed up to Amazon's glacier deep freeze. I pay about $1/month to back up all of my pictures. I intend to put other important things there too but haven't gotten there yet.

• 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.

Right now, nothing 😈 (but my dotfiles/etc configs live on several machines)

Before, I used Restic (incremental, encrypted backup over network), which I really liked. I think I should set it up again.

All my configs are in gitlab or a self hosted forgejo server and all files are in seafile or a self hosted service running on proxmox. Then I use proxmox backup server on a storage VPS for off-site backup

Using timeshift. Very, very easy, works great.