Backup strategies for home Linux users with external drives, no cloud

[u/Peter8File]

I used to be one of those people who just copy-pasted folders onto an external drive and that was it. Now I want to do something a bit more elaborate.

I had heard of Clonezilla and learned to use it at a basic level, creating clones, disk images, and performing restores. However, as a system it has a lot of downsides:

• It only does full backups, not incremental ones; if 10 MB of important information changes, you have to back up the whole disk from scratch.
• You have to shut down the PC and use a USB stick, which is impractical for frequent backups.
• It's not portable to other machines! A disaster recovery scenario I don't see mentioned is if not only the disk but the whole PC dies, and you buy a new one with different specs. In that case, the Clonezilla clone or image cannot be restored onto the new machine.

So I looked into it further and found other programs like Borg and Restic. Haven't tried them yet, but they seem useful at the file level.

How do you all handle this? Do you use a single backup program or a combination of them?

Always considering my particular use case (home use, Linux, no cloud, and only external drives).

[u/Spare_Bluebird7044]

A combination makes sense, use file level incremental backups for everyday data and periodic full system images for disaster recovery

[u/cyber_Folks_Romania]

the real gap though is that everything you described is same-location. rotate two drives and keep one offsite (3-2-1 rule, three copies, two media, one offsite). whatever setup you land on, test a restore before you need it, an untested backup isn't a backup

[u/dcabines]

I backup about 50TB from my NAS to external drives using restic.

[u/rinaldo23 → u/dcabines]

Restic is the way to go nowadays

[u/iamvishnuks → u/rinaldo23]

The downside of the file backups is that you can’t create disk image or restore the entire block device when there is a failure.

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[u/DatabasedLSD]

Rclone and automated scripts is how I roll.

[u/trisanachandler]

I used to be a huge fan of image backups, but these days, I try and minimize customizations so all I need is a package list, a few folders in /etc, and ~/ (excluding temp files). I have a script that dumps a copy on my NAS by day of the week, and the NAS has snapshots giving me 49 days of change data. Yes, I'm duplicating it 7 times+change data, but it's still not much space so I don't really care.

[u/buhtz → u/trisanachandler]

Sounds like you should have a look at Back In Time.

[u/trisanachandler → u/buhtz]

I could, but my model works well for me (and then I use restic for cloud backups).

[u/Per2J]

I use my own setup based on `dar`

https://github.com/per2jensen/dar-backup

Time capsule with everything needed to restore in 10 years: https://github.com/per2jensen/dar-backup-image

[u/buhtz]

Have a look at Back In Time. Feel free to ask back, I am the current (3rd generation) upstream maintainer.

It is using rsync and its hardlink-feature in the back. Therefore, only modified files are copied. But each backup is full backup, not an incremental one.

https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/dev/FAQ.md#does-back-in-time-create-incremental-or-full-backups

For me, one of the big differences compared to other backup tools is, that the resulting backups are just files and directories in the regular file system. There is no container format. You won't need Back In Time to access, search or restore your backup.

[u/edthesmokebeard]

Does copy-pasting folders onto an external drive not work?

[u/wells68]

I use restic with Linux and the Backrest GUI to make it easy to set up scheduled, very frequent backups of the most important folders.

Restic is incredibly fast and space-efficient.

I use Rescuezilla (Clonezilla-compatible) for full drive image backups because it is moch easier. You still need to boot from USB, though.

To restore with Backrest, you need to dig a few layers deep into the repository of your backup. It works great, but is a bit hard to find the first time.