Right now I’m creating a nightly restic snapshot of my server on borgbase and on some spare drives, and keeping the snapshots forever. There’s a ton of daily churn in my data though, between databases and logs and other files that don’t constitute ‘real data’ but might be needed to restore the app.
Always last daily, weekly, monthly. The others are pointers (hardlinks). How many years, i’m not there yet.
Backups?
where we’re going, we don’t need backups!
I have daily backups, weekly, monthly and yearly. All but yearly is deleted after a certain time, but yearly I keep forever.
For frequently changing data hourly up to 24, daily up to 7, weekly upto 4, monthly up to 12.
For daily changing data daily up to 7 and etc. as above.
For seldom changing data a backup every 3 days with rotation based on a storage quota, and retention of manually held samples.
For configs I use Home Manager on a public Git repo. And for everything else I use Pika Backup.
I learned I pretty much never need old data for my hobby selfhosting stuff. So I do 4 weeks. I’ll notice if something breaks within 4 weeks and fix it. I occasionally do manual backups, for example when migrating stuff and keep them for longer. And I got some old stuff like in xkcd 1360.
I suppose I could do more, but I also want the privacy policy of my online services to say: x weeks and all the logs and unnecessary data is gone.
I know I’ll get shot for this, but I stopped backing up a long time ago.
I was doing it at home because I do it at work and it’s the done thing. But when I stopped to think about it, I realised I don’t have anything at home that actually matters. If I lose my Plex library it’s ok.
I use nightly backups. I keep them 2 weeks.
After that I keep a weekly backup for 2 months.
After that I keep a monthly backup for 2 years.
I keep my yearly backups forever.
I just
rsynca full backup of my NAS’s entire RAID array every week to a separate machine. I have Proxmox set up with an NFS mount to the NAS where it stores all of the/[userdata]volumes that my VMs and LXCs use; Proxmox itself is hosted on 3x office PCs, each with i7-7700/500GB SSD/32GB RAM, and set up for replication in case one goes down. On occasion I’ll actually document which services I’m using, so I don’t really bother backing those up since the volume holding the userdata itself is backed up and can be easily remapped to a new instance of whatever service needs it.Most of what I would use proxmox for doesn’t even require backing up. A copy of each VM when it is setup and possibly update that every few years would be plenty.
I think you can export the whole VM? Using virtualbox currently which has import/export appliance. Doing that on an infrequent basis is pretty much what I would need.
Proxmox has backup stuff for VMs and containers which uses whatever storage youbadd (local, NFS,), and has retention settings. iirc those will always be full backups. for incremental and more, proxmox backup server (PBS VM using backupNAS as destination for me)
I was backing up multiple places on my LAN but than half of my place flooded, so lamenat and carpet was ripped up, one of my pi 5’s was misplaced with a NVMe drive and another was lost. Than just down the street 3 house went up in flames had the wind been blowing just a little south my condo complex would have been burnt to the ground. After the fire fighters were telling us to get back further and further I had my main pi 5 that had all the backups of everything important on another NVMe drive and a few other things ready to go if the firefighters started banging on my door telling me it was time to leave. I wish I could honestly say that was the day I decided to get a VPS and start my back up, but I was still hoping my father would let me set up a pi with a drive big enough to do back ups at his place. It sounds like he will but he is concerned about security risks about my VPN, funny thing is my back up pi would be the most secure thing hooked up to his modem/router and I wouldn’t want his stuff touching my stuff and with how my LAN and VPN are set up they would have a hard time doing it. Anywho I have a domain hosted by EasyDNS, and just went and looked at their VPS options and got some year long plan and set up cron jobs to take the stuff I want to backup and use age to encrypt it and than it is sent to my VPS each age container is than deleted after there is something of the same name but 3 days iterations older and deletes it.
Is using a VPS cost effective compared to uploading to object storage?
I use rclone to sync backups to Backblaze object storage. I find it hard to believe a VPS would be cheaper, considering the disk space on those can be very expensive compared to object storage.
If it was just for backup backblaze is probably less expensive but my LAN consists mostly of pi’s and hand me down computers. I am slowly moving things around on my LAN so to each their own I guess. I like the idea of having more control over my stuff so having a whole Debian system on the other end feels right for me.
*edit: It also gives me peace of mind knowing that I can encrypt my stuff to my liking. Silly me I forgot to actually look at the encryption tool I used, I just did a search and found age was highly suggested. It is coded in Go, sure it is open source and all that I am just not a fan of the language.
Ah yeah makes sense if it’s not just for storing an offsite copy of backups like mine is.
I just buy new HDDs.
Unironically how I use LTO-6 tapes.
2.5TB of storage for ~$5/tape on ebay.
Never delete anything. If the authorities ever come after me, discovery is going to be hilarious.
What’s the catch, why don’t we use those? I/O speed? Limited read/write cycles? I imagine it sucks if you need files on opposite ends of the tape.
The drives are crazy expensive if you want to use a somewhat recent generation.
My local backup drives still have room (it’s my main pool with all bluray backups that’s begging for more space), but borgbase is approaching the point where I’ll have to bump to a higher tier or pay per gb. Looking at my usage chart every day adds at a minimum 50mb so something has to change.
Daily for 10 days, 4 weekly, 4 monthly.
That covers me from broken updates, generally.
came to say something like this but not sure why you would do daily for 10 days. Your doing weeklys so why not 7. I would rather increase the monthly to 7 or do 6 bi monthly and keep a yearly.
Your doing weeklys so why not 7
They are all daily backups, those schedules I pointed out are for pruning. And I don’t understand the question… How would keeping 7 instead of 10 dailies help me?
because your last weekly would be a max of 7 days out
How am I going to restore day 8, day 9, or day 10 backups if I only keep 7 days?
How do you restore on day 11, 12 or 13 if you only keep 10 days?
I don’t need days after 10. I need days up to 10.
look im not that committed to a different scheme. Just seems to me once you get to a week and do a weekly you are good on days. heck I would do 6 daily ones and have the weekly one just be the 7th day of the week. free up yet another deep backup.
Haha OK bud
How long do you keep your backups?
Yes, I have that exernal HDD lying around somewhere near the PC, and it was at least 4 or 5 times that I backed up a lot of files on it.
I think I keep it for more than 10 years now.
As long as I have space. My backups are on dedicated drives, and as they run out of space the old ones are deleted.
I guess OPs question is more about what makes you comfortable.
Is your drive only big enough for 2 backups or is it big enough for hundreds? If it was half that size would you still be happy with the number of backups? A quarter of the size?
Kinda depends on what it’s for. My server? IDK, 2 days. Maybe have a dedicated weekly/monthly backup left behind. PC? Honestly just the latest is fine.
But it’s a 10tb drive, so I’ve got months of backups even if they’re running continuously. It’s less a how comfortable I am and more a how much can I afford. (a lot more before the shortage)
I also explicitly purge stuff that’s constantly changing like logs. I don’t care for logs in my backups. Only on the live machine.
I have about 750GB of irreplaceable files on my server so I want a really solid history. A couple of days backup is no where near enough to give me peace of mind 😅
3 2 1 offsite backups typically happen a lot less often than local copies or local backups.
I also don’t really consider any machines data to be irreplaceable. If I lose my phone I want the latest backup. But taxes or photos I care for? Those are an entirely different backup, and those aren’t incremental. They’re just what they are.
I have Nextcloud on my server which stores all those documents and photos etc. I have nightly offsite backup as well as backing up to a local borg repo on a separate drive.
But as it’s that important to me, I also do a once-yearly backup of non-encrypted files to M-Disc, with two copies, one stored at my mother’s house. This way if my house burns down and I’m inside it, my family can still get (most of) the precious memories without needing to know how to access a borg repo and without having to know how to download from Backblaze object storage.
I’m just a little bit paranoid about losing things after that one time I dragged from a USB stick to my computer and when it was done moving the files they were all corrupt, and didn’t exist on the USB stick anymore either. Thanks Windows, a whole holiday of photos gone.
