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.
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.
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 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.
This is the way !
Thanks. Heard a lot about it. Will check it.
Oh interesting! I might take a look at btrbk
This is what I do. Btrfs snapshots and use send/receive with my NAS.
- 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.
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.You very much will. It’s easier than you’d think.
automated/networked backups like people are talking about here are great, but even just an external SSD and the nautilus copy function will give you at least some insurance.
I just use
rsyncto backup my home folder to my NAS.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 organize 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 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.
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)
Just a reminder. Consider and test your restore process as well. Backups without restore testing are kind of questionable. Also think how the restore will go. Do you want to do a bare metal restore, or will you just reinstall, and restore certain things for example. Lot of these backup methods will not get a true bare metal restore set, nor can file system backups be “perfect” if they are done on a running system. Databases and things like cryptfs mounts for example can be problematic for example. Nor do all tools necessarily backup the full structure of the file system.
Not saying these are always issues, just be aware of them.
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 like pikabackup it’s based on borg
Yeah, this is what I’ve found to be the best option. The encryption and deduplication is great.
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
