Comment on What is your preferred method for backing up several TB of data?

• computergeek125@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  In the IT world, we just call that a server. The usual golden rule for backups is 3-2-1:

  • 3 copies of the data total, of which
  • 2 are backups (not the primary access), and
  • 1 of the backups is off-site.

  So, if the data is only server side, it’s just data. If the data is only client side, it’s just data. But if the data is fully replicated on both sides, now you have a backup.

  There’s a related adage regarding backups: “if there’s two copies of the data, you effectively have one. If there’s only one copy of the data, you can never guarantee it’s there”. Basically, I means you should always assume one copy somewhere will fail and you will be left with n-1 copies. In your example, if your server failed or got ransomwared, you wouldn’t have a complete dataset since the local computer doesn’t have a full replica.

  I recently had a a backup drive fail on me, and all I had to do was just buy a new one. No data loss, I just regenerated the backup as soon as the drive was spun up. I’ve also had to restore entire servers that have failed. Minimal data loss since the last backup, but nothing I couldn’t rebuild.

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  • jkrtn@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes, I do see that. I’m definitely getting answers to a question I didn’t intend. I was hoping for more of an rsync but that something which also provides viewing and incremental backups to an offsite. I don’t know how to phrase that, and perhaps for what I want it makes more sense to have rsync/rclone to copy files around and something else to view.

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    • skilltheamps@feddit.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It is not that easy to understand what you want, to me it reads like you want something like Nextcloud - i.e. your own little cloud, where you can put all your stuff, and view it through the webbrowser or the nextcloud apps, and also keep selected parts of your stuff in sync with your devices (or automatically upload photos take with your smartphone for example).

      Backup of Nextcloud (or whatever you want to use) is a seperate topic. Any incremental backup tool would apply though, so there’s much to choose from. I personally use btrbk which uses Btrfs Send+Receive to push incremental snapshots to an offsite server.

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