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Backups Aren't Simple

filipovski.net

81–90 of 208 posts

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#81

I’m setting up 3-2-1-ish backups for my infra of 3 hosts, and definitely leaning towards Restic + Backrest. All my hosts run the same CoreOS setup ( https://github.com/ebrahim37/infra-template ), where container volumes are placed in one central volumes/ folder and that is the only thing I have to backup. I plan to implement it like this: vps1: - restic container with custom sh entrypoint that will backup volumes/ to…

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Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#82

There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents. The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover every…

OneDrive... So much fail in one single product.

It is made by Microsoft, the experts in this domain.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#83
I really like ZFS snapshots with offsite pull-mode sync using Jim Salter's sanoid/syncoid [1]. ZFS is the base for all OS/filesystems on top of it. If you have a good system for organizing ZFS datasets, and separating ephemeral from persistent data (e.g. [2]), then this is 90% of the backup requirements already fullfilled.

    [1]: https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid
    [2]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-05-16_rootless_docker_virtiofs_proxmox/

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#84
+1 for restic.

ZFS snapshots + restic backups to backblaze for my homeserver. My secret sauce is a healtchecks.io instance that blows up my phone if ZFS scrubs throw any errors, when local snapshots fail, or when restic checks or backups fail.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#85
My setup: rsync to Synology NAS, snapshotting there, sync to remote Synology NAS over VPN. (The other NAS is at my parent's and they have similar setup syncing to me)

The best part: it is just files, not some proprietary archive. I have high confidence in this. I can restore with the most rudimentary tools.

This setup has worked for me well on linux, windows and now mac. I migrated to new computer&os by restoring the backup mostly.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#86
post #79

There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents. The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover every…

Since we’re talking about it: anyone backing up their iCloud photos? If so, how?

I have a weird setup lol. I use a shared photos library with my partner (so that we have all family photos together) and have a MacBook Air that has Photos being download in raw quality and backups then via Time Machine on a Synology NAS. Plus, Synology photo sync on my iPhone (backing up on my NAS separately from Time Machine) AND Google Photos on my partner’s (syncing on Google Photos). Yes it’s horrible, just never had time to clean I up properly but I prefer to have them in multiple cloud locations and locally for now than optimise for having a clean setup.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#87

So is apparently making readable site. Software like https://restic.net/ does a good job. Few choices of backend Accepts stuff from pipe too so you can just pipe mysqldump or pg_dumpall without intermediate files Very decent options for checking repo integrity, personally (well, at work too, we use it on few hundred user machines and servers) I also added "roll a dice for backup and try to restore it" test script to…

I'm using Restic & Backrest ( https://garethgeorge.github.io/backrest/ ) everywhere I can, they're both exceptional OSS. IMHO, the easiest way to perform a restore test is to use your production backups to refresh a lesser environment on a weekly cadence. Naturally this has to be appropriate to the type of data you're restoring, e.g., our E2E (end to end) testing environment has been built to the same risk tolerances…

I was using Restic + Backrest as well for my personal Windows machines and it was great. Then I found out that Backrest stores the vault password (among other things) in a simple plaintext file on your local hard drive. Not sure if this applies to all platforms but for Windows users that is a huge security hole in today's environment.

https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest/issues/1047

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#88

There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents. The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover every…

>I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover everything.

This made me remember the time during the 90s when I lost all my BASIC programs due to a hard disk crash, and seeing me sitting sad, my mother handed me a bunch of floppies and asked me to see if they contain something useful.

And turned out that it had all the programs! I took the backups and forgot about that. Apparently that is one of the hard things with backups. You need to track them...

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#89

I have a cron script that rsync my entire home directory every day with a remote server. Since rsync doesn't remove remote files, I re-create a backup from scratch the first day of each month and store a copy of the previous one. Using old standardized open source tools means it survives system updates without having to fix anything for years. I got my laptop stolen/lost 3 times over the past 15 years, and I have alw…

rsync can delete remote files with --delete or --delete-after

What is missing is recovering accidentally deleted or corrupted data.

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