I am using duplicati and thinking of switching to Borg. What do you use and why?
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 use restic. For local backups, Timeshift.
Seconded, I use restic with a remote blob storage and works nicely
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)
And there is a nice graphical frontend for it too: Vorta
Personally more of Pika Backup user ;)
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 snapshotcommand 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 /diris shorter but more confusing thanrestic -r repo backup /dir
I’ve been using Kopia on my desktop computer for a few years now to do cloud backups. It’s generally working well and I haven’t found anything else with the same combination of features yet.
That said, kopia-ui is still a bit finicky and I’ve managed to bork a repo beyond repair a few times (e.g. once because my cloud provider account ran out of space, leading to some kind of inconsistent state) and there are some oddities, like the regular “periodic maintenance” (it’s a bit weird that it’s needed in the first place) randomly failing or taking forever.
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
Oh interesting! I might take a look at btrbk
Thanks. Heard a lot about it. Will check it.
This is the way !
This is what I do. Btrfs snapshots and use send/receive with my NAS.
I just use
rsyncto backup my home folder to my NAS.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 general - 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
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.
I don’t have backups. :/
And I will regret it some day.
I use github for code so that’s backed up though.
There are two kinds of people.
Those who make backups and those who will.
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’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.
- 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.
What problem are you trying to solve? Please think about that, and about your backup strategy, before you decide on any specific tools.
For example, here are several scenarios that I guard against in my backup strategy:
- Accidentally delete a file, I want to recover it quickly (snapshots);
- Entire drive goes kablooie, I want my system to continue running without downtime (RAID)
- User data drive goes kablooie, I want to recover (many many options)
- Root drive goes kablooie, I want to recover (baremetal recovery tools)
- House burns down or computer is damaged/stolen (offsite backups)
I work with VMs mostly, so I go for Veeam B&R. The free tier allows you to backup 10 VMs or machines.
I just use a script on an systemd timer. Well two scripts on two timers really - one running daily, one weekly for different data. It’s just a bunch of rsync commands copying folders to an hdd in my system and I reroute the output into a simple log file, mainly to verify if it ran at all. I am a bit paranoid about that. I can also run it manually whenever I want. Oh and some of the data I also rsync again to a smb cloud drive from Hetzner. I do not keep multiple versions and I delete remote files that have been deleted locally. It’s just a 1:1 copy.
Oh and I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed so I have auto configured btrfs snapshots. Though I have not needed them yet and could not even say how I can use those. I figure that out once I need them.
