Comment on Recommendations for data backup solutions ?
HelloRoot@lemy.lol 4 days ago
I have 2 powered RAID enclosures from icybox with 2 multi TB HDD in each one. The RAID is set to mirror the drives.
They are connected via usb 3 to a raspberry pi which runs borgbackup.
One is in my own place, just next to the main server.
The other is at my parents place in another city.
All my desktops, laptops and servers have borgmatic installed with the two pi’s as two targets. So when I create a backup it gets send to both locations. On my PCs I manually do a borg backup like once a month when I feel like it. The server computers are all on a daily schedule.
Borg has extremely efficient compression and defuplication. So having 20 historical snapshots of the whole file storage of each device takes about 30% less space than the original size on disk.
For example my desktop currently uses ~800GB but the borgbackup of said desktop takes only ~500GB.
The only disadvantage I find is that there is no cross system deduplication.
The super useful advantage is that I was able to just take the HDD enclosure, plug it into my Desktop and restore whatever files I want. I did an rsync to a blank fs once and it restored everything properly. And it’s pretty cheap. like 150$ total per backup location without any significant monthly costs.
witten@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You could achieve this by having all machines write to a single Borg repository, where everything would get deduplicated. But downsides include: 1. You lose everything if something goes wrong with that one repo, and 2. You’d have to schedule backups across all systems so as not to run at the same time, because the single repo can only have a single writer at once.
HelloRoot@lemy.lol 3 days ago
I tried that once and it takes way longer to run a backup.
witten@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It makes a certain amount of sense. More deduplication means more CPU (and IO) spent on that work.