I work for a company that handles backup at the scale of the biggest companies in the world. And I promise you, what's hard is not the backup, it's it's security (to not lose it, to not let it get corrupt, to avoid any unintended usage, ...) and its restauration.
World Backup Day
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Re: World Backup Day
#42This is very much about personal backups but while we're here - what open source backup tools do people recommend for very simple filesystem backups to a remote server?
FreeFileSync
It's what you'd like if your idea of simplicity is dragging and dropping one folder to another, but want to more closely see what files have changed before the copy.
Re: World Backup Day
#43In case no-one’s aware, iPhone / iPad Files app has a “Connect to Server” (…) option which can connect to an SMB share, making it significantly easier to back up any downloaded or created files to a PC without having to install and use iTunes. And there’s plugging in the device via USB, which mounts the DCIM files (photos and videos) as a mass storage device, and allows to you to back up those, too.
Thanks for the tip! I missed that.
Re: World Backup Day
#44This is very much about personal backups but while we're here - what open source backup tools do people recommend for very simple filesystem backups to a remote server?
rsync is great
Re: World Backup Day
#45Went through many iterations over the years. Arq, restic, borg, tarsnap setting up encryption, incremental backups with cronjobs and all the good stuff. Some years ago I realized that I value the possibility to restore also for people that are not me higher than the nerd factor and security so I just settled with Backblaze as my main backup and Time Machine for local convenience. Carbon Copy Cloned to just clone my a…
I have made my system pretty basic, relying on cron and rsync, because I figure that’s the most futureproof and secure way. But you helped me realize that if something happened to me and our NAS, my family would not be able to restore from backup. I’ll have to work on that.
Re: World Backup Day
#46I was happy with my restic, borg (vorta), and tarsnap backup setup until one day I had to retrieve just one file from the backups and I realised there was no straight forward way to do that in any of these. Now I think I must look for backup which lets be “easily” get my files back and search whether something is there by a certain approximate name among my backups without having me deal with mounts (that too one ver…
You can just mount a Borg archive with a single command and then explore it like any other filesystem
Re: World Backup Day
#47This is very much about personal backups but while we're here - what open source backup tools do people recommend for very simple filesystem backups to a remote server?
rsync is great
Well the current system is a shell script with rsync that I wrote but I'd like something slightly more sophisticated without having to build logic myself for incremental backups, potentially encryption, etc, etc
Re: World Backup Day
#48In case no-one’s aware, iPhone / iPad Files app has a “Connect to Server” (…) option which can connect to an SMB share, making it significantly easier to back up any downloaded or created files to a PC without having to install and use iTunes. And there’s plugging in the device via USB, which mounts the DCIM files (photos and videos) as a mass storage device, and allows to you to back up those, too.
TIL — apparently since iOS 13 !
Re: World Backup Day
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
rsync is great
Well the current system is a shell script with rsync that I wrote but I'd like something slightly more sophisticated without having to build logic myself for incremental backups, potentially encryption, etc, etc
They might have meant rclone: https://rclone.org/
Re: World Backup Day
#50The website should also encourage users to download a copy of their online accounts (Google Takeout, Facebook data, etc). That's a pretty big omission in 2024. I know plenty of people who have been locked out of their own accounts for one reason or another.
Nice one - you reminded me to restart my Thunderbird backup of GMail. I've got it setup to use imap to connect to GMail (a couple of different accounts as it happens) so it's got a copy of all my emails and keeps itself up to date efficiently. As a bonus, it's far more capable at deleting old messages if I need to clear some space to keep under Google's limit.
Try running 'getmail' with a daily cron job. It's an old piece of software, and (at least for me) required an initial `for` loop to catch up with old mail, but it's the best low-maintenance way to backup Gmail AFAIK.
Deleting old mail is another story though.