Comment on Data Backup Solutions
walden@wetshav.ing 3 weeks ago
I'm not sure I fully grasp what you want, but Restic is excellent. I use a cronjob to back up on a schedule. It's command line only. I think there's a tool to make it a GUI but I haven't tried it. They have a Docker image available but it's weird, you have to pass commands to it, it runs, then shuts down when it's done. I love Docker but that didn't quite work for me.
I use Backblaze B2 for storage, but any S3 will do. Restic supports all sorts of storage targets.
Credentials and things go in an .env file, or you can put everything into the command line every time.
When it's time to restore things, you can fricken mount the whole backup you want and browse the files, copy and paste what you need, etc. That part is really cool to me.
Backblaze is $5 or $6 USD per TB per month, so 500GB will be about $36USD a year.
I also use restic for backups. I actually switched from Borg because it kept getting stuck and failing but couldn’t work out why. Not had issues with restic (so far, touch wood!).
I use resticprofile with yaml configurations though (github.com/creativeprojects/resticprofile), which made it much easier for me to figure out.
I use borgbase for offsite backups.
I also wholeheartedly recommend Restic. Hetzner Storage Box or Backblaze B2 are great storage backends and directly supported by Restic.
Borg is great too, though I’ve never used it because I’ve discovered Restic first.
ElectricWaterfall@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Fun tip on restic for restoring or browsing snapshots. The restic mount command lets you mount your backups to your filesystem and that enables you to browse all your snapshots and all the code at different points in time all from your file manager. Then you can just drag and drop to restore files as needed.
walden@wetshav.ing 2 weeks ago
I've never had to restore a backup (yet), but to me this is the best feature of Restic.
I used Duplicati for a while (I think it was Duplicati, not Duplicacy) and although the backups seemed to work, I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.
Restic is a slight chore to get set up with the environmental variables, figuring out which directories to "--ignore", etc... but man once it's set up it's just great.
rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.
Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.
The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.