Comment on Data Backup Solutions
walden@wetshav.ing 7 hours agoI'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 6 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.