I'd like some sort of a comparison with Duplicity/Déjà Dup that seems to be the default on Gnome/Cinnamon.
Is that usable nowadays? Last time I checked it was hellishly slow compared to borg.
Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
101–110 of 180 posts
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#102Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#103[flagged]
It’s not really a ‘system restore tool’ it’s a fully fledged backup program like Veeam
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
LVM snapshots are copy on write and can be used the same way.
Any backup software that utilizes LVM in this way? Ie automatically creates a snapshot and sends the incremental changes since previous snapshot to a backup destination like a NAS or S3 blob storage.
I think block-level snapshots would be very difficult to use this way.
I just make a full dedupped backups from LVM snapshots with kopia, but I've set that up only on one system, on others I just use kopia as-is.
It takes some time, but that's fine for me. Previous backup of 25 GB an hour ago took 20 minutes. I suppose if it only walked files it knew were changed it would be a lot faster.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have much of an opinion on why you went with Restic over Borg? The single Go binary is an obvious one, perhaps that alone is enough. I remember some people having un-bound memory usage with Restic but that might have been a very old version.
The big one for me was https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#can-i-b... .
This was basically one big reason why I went with https://kopia.io . The other might have been its native S3 support.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why you do a filesystem snapshot before the backup, something supported by all systems. The snapshot is constant to the backup tool, and read order or subsequent writes don't matter. The main difference is that Windows and MacOS have a mechanism that communicates with applications that a snapshot is about to be taken, allowing the applications (such as databases) to build a more "consistent" version of their f…
> something supported by all systems Well, supported by Windows and MacOS. Linux only if you happen to use zfs or btrfs, and also only if the backup tool you use happens to rely on those snapshots.
I believe basically any filesystem will work if you have it on LVM. Bonus of lv snaps being thin snapshots too
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#107Magical thing about timeshift is that you can use it straight from your live CD. It will find root, backups, and restore it together with a boot partition.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#108I've probably spent way too much time thinking about Linux backup over the years. But thankfully, I found a setup that works really well for me in 2018 or so, used it for the last few years, and I wrote up a detailed blog post about it just a month ago: https://amontalenti.com/2024/06/19/backups-restic-rclone The tools I use on Linux for backup are restic + rclone, storing my restic repo on a speedy USB3 SSD. For off…
Do you have much of an opinion on why you went with Restic over Borg? The single Go binary is an obvious one, perhaps that alone is enough. I remember some people having un-bound memory usage with Restic but that might have been a very old version.
For me, these traits made restic initially attractive:
- encrypted, chunk-deduped, snapshotted backups
- single Go binary, so I could even backup the binary used to create my backups
- reasonable versioning and release scheme
- I could read, and understand, its design document: https://github.com/restic/restic/blob/master/doc/design.rst
I then just tried using it for a year and never hit any issues with it, so kept going, and now it's 6+ years later.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#109I've probably spent way too much time thinking about Linux backup over the years. But thankfully, I found a setup that works really well for me in 2018 or so, used it for the last few years, and I wrote up a detailed blog post about it just a month ago: https://amontalenti.com/2024/06/19/backups-restic-rclone The tools I use on Linux for backup are restic + rclone, storing my restic repo on a speedy USB3 SSD. For off…
Do you only back up your home directory, or also others? I didn't find info about that in your post.
I backup everything except for scratch/tmp/device style directories. Bytes are cheap to store, my system is a rounding error vs my /home, and deduping goes a long way.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
One problem with file based backups is that they are not atomic across the filesystem. If you ever back up a database (or really any application that expects atomicity while it’s running), then you might corrupt the database and lose data. This might not seem like a big problem, but can affect e.g. SQLite, which is quite popular as a file format. Then again, the likelihood that the backup will be inconsistent is fair…
You can also use lvm2 and then you get atomic snapshots with any file system (I think it needs to support fsfreeze, I guess all of them do).
I never knew this. Thanks for sharing!