Comment on Data Backup Solutions
ElectricWaterfall@lemmy.zip 11 hours agoFun 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 11 hours 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 11 hours 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.