How long do you keep your backups?

Comments

• Sibbo@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I have daily backups, weekly, monthly and yearly. All but yearly is deleted after a certain time, but yearly I keep forever.

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• hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I learned I pretty much never need old data for my hobby selfhosting stuff. So I do 4 weeks. I’ll notice if something breaks within 4 weeks and fix it. I occasionally do manual backups, for example when migrating stuff and keep them for longer. And I got some old stuff like in xkcd 1360.

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• Greenbeard@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Backups?

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• Reannlegge@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I was backing up multiple places on my LAN but than half of my place flooded, so lamenat and carpet was ripped up, one of my pi 5’s was misplaced with a NVMe drive and another was lost. Than just down the street 3 house went up in flames had the wind been blowing just a little south my condo complex would have been burnt to the ground. After the fire fighters were telling us to get back further and further I had my main pi 5 that had all the backups of everything important on another NVMe drive and a few other things ready to go if the firefighters started banging on my door telling me it was time to leave. I wish I could honestly say that was the day I decided to get a VPS and start my back up, but I was still hoping my father would let me set up a pi with a drive big enough to do back ups at his place. It sounds like he will but he is concerned about security risks about my VPN, funny thing is my back up pi would be the most secure thing hooked up to his modem/router and I wouldn’t want his stuff touching my stuff and with how my LAN and VPN are set up they would have a hard time doing it. Anywho I have a domain hosted by EasyDNS, and just went and looked at their VPS options and got some year long plan and set up cron jobs to take the stuff I want to backup and use age to encrypt it and than it is sent to my VPS each age container is than deleted after there is something of the same name but 3 days iterations older and deletes it.

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  • Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Is using a VPS cost effective compared to uploading to object storage?

    I use rclone to sync backups to Backblaze object storage. I find it hard to believe a VPS would be cheaper, considering the disk space on those can be very expensive compared to object storage.

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    • Reannlegge@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If it was just for backup backblaze is probably less expensive but my LAN consists mostly of pi’s and hand me down computers. I am slowly moving things around on my LAN so to each their own I guess. I like the idea of having more control over my stuff so having a whole Debian system on the other end feels right for me.

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• Hupf@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Snape saying “Always.”

  I just buy new HDDs.

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  • chewypoops@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Unironically how I use LTO-6 tapes.

    2.5TB of storage for ~$5/tape on ebay.

    Never delete anything. If the authorities ever come after me, discovery is going to be hilarious.

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    • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      What’s the catch, why don’t we use those? I/O speed? Limited read/write cycles? I imagine it sucks if you need files on opposite ends of the tape.

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  • gwheel@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    My local backup drives still have room (it’s my main pool with all bluray backups that’s begging for more space), but borgbase is approaching the point where I’ll have to bump to a higher tier or pay per gb. Looking at my usage chart every day adds at a minimum 50mb so something has to change.

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• NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I use nightly backups. I keep them 2 weeks.

  After that I keep a weekly backup for 2 months.

  After that I keep a monthly backup for 2 years.

  I keep my yearly backups forever.

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• fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  As long as I have space. My backups are on dedicated drives, and as they run out of space the old ones are deleted.

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  • Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I guess OPs question is more about what makes you comfortable.

    Is your drive only big enough for 2 backups or is it big enough for hundreds? If it was half that size would you still be happy with the number of backups? A quarter of the size?

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    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Kinda depends on what it’s for. My server? IDK, 2 days. Maybe have a dedicated weekly/monthly backup left behind. PC? Honestly just the latest is fine.

      But it’s a 10tb drive, so I’ve got months of backups even if they’re running continuously. It’s less a how comfortable I am and more a how much can I afford. (a lot more before the shortage)

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• bertlewirth@lemy.lol ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  where we’re going, we don’t need backups!

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• Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  How long do you keep your backups?

  Yes, I have that exernal HDD lying around somewhere near the PC, and it was at least 4 or 5 times that I backed up a lot of files on it.

  I think I keep it for more than 10 years now.

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• Guiorgy@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  For frequently changing data hourly up to 24, daily up to 7, weekly upto 4, monthly up to 12.

  For daily changing data daily up to 7 and etc. as above.

  For seldom changing data a backup every 3 days with rotation based on a storage quota, and retention of manually held samples.

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• non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Daily for 10 days, 4 weekly, 4 monthly.

  That covers me from broken updates, generally.

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  • hubertmanne@piefed.social@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    came to say something like this but not sure why you would do daily for 10 days. Your doing weeklys so why not 7. I would rather increase the monthly to 7 or do 6 bi monthly and keep a yearly.

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    • non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Your doing weeklys so why not 7

      They are all daily backups, those schedules I pointed out are for pruning. And I don’t understand the question… How would keeping 7 instead of 10 dailies help me?

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• PetteriPano@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  My VPS gets a weekly rsync to my home server. I keep ten deduplicated copies for weeks gone by. The current week also gets synced off-site with encryption.

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• NoLemurs@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  [forget]
  keep-daily = 10
  keep-weekly = 4
  

  Daily backups are cheap because of de-duplication. I keep a few weekly backups in case it takes me a bit to notice something went wrong. I don’t usually back up logs.

  I could probably drop the weekly backups without much risk, but I’ve got the space.

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• monkdervierte@lemmy.zip@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Always last daily, weekly, monthly. The others are pointers (hardlinks). How many years, i’m not there yet.

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• krypto@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I know I’ll get shot for this, but I stopped backing up a long time ago.

  I was doing it at home because I do it at work and it’s the done thing. But when I stopped to think about it, I realised I don’t have anything at home that actually matters. If I lose my Plex library it’s ok.

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  • HerbGrower@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Other than my password manager database, the rest of my backups are not overly valuable. I don’t really need my 2016 factorio saves, but I have them. Adding more things to backup is minimal effort so I do, but if the space taken up becomes a concern there is plenty I could trim from it.

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• JustARaccoon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  7 backups, though the frequency they’re taken (daily Vs weekly Vs monthly) depends on the service.

  Why don’t you exclude logs from your backups? databases sure yes that’s where the real info is (not sure why you don’t consider it real data) but logs are useless outside of the current running instance.

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  • gwheel@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I didn’t really want to poke through each containers files to figure out where it stores logs, plus it adds risk that I’m not backing up something I should.

    When I say databases aren’t real data, I’m more talking about them changing every day despite nothing happening. Even if I haven’t taken any photos or opened the app, today’s db dump of immich is not the same as yesterday’s db dump so restic stores it as a new unique file.

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    • JustARaccoon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I did mean to ask, why restic into Borg instead of just Borg?

      on the logs thing that’s fair enough, most of the stuff I use has a clear “logs” folder I can exclude, and I checked what the backup contains Vs what the container data folder has before calling it a day

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• superglue@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I use bormatic, I can go back about 60 days and have needed to a few times in the past due to my own mistakes. Server is in the basement, it backs up toy living room TV pc which is on the top floor. My upload speed is too slow for offsite backups.

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• Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Let me put it this way: I have a removable harddisk with my files from the universities’ VAX 11/780 in storage. Long enough?

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• Seralth@piefed.seralth.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Zero or one backups depending on the type of data generally.

  For a system if it can’t be redeployed from a list of requirements then I Foundationally ducked up. It means either I’m depending on something fragile, unknowable or over complicated.

  Raw data on the other hand goes on a raid array. If I need more redundancy then that, then a single extra off site backup on a cd or something.

  A back up on the same drive as the original isn’t a backup. It’s a waste of space, and a stupid idea.

  A system that requires excessive nonsense is not reliable.

  If I have a on and off site back up and both fail. Then either the world is literally fucking on fire and it doesn’t matter. Or someone dropped a bomb on my storage.

  Either way I have bigger problems at that point.

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  • Sibbo@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    A back up on the same drive as the original isn’t a backup. It’s a waste of space, and a stupid idea.

    It’s a backup that helps against software errors, but not against drive failures. Depending on what you want to achieve, it’s a perfectly valid strategy.

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    • confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I generally have Operating System backups that are stored on the same drive. Those backups are immediately copied to 3 different devices, my computer and two other drives

      The backup on the local drive is useful for when I’m tinkering, making adjustments, adding or removing stuff. Restoring from that local backup is far more convenient than using the remote backups

      I don’t use anything with a database so all my static media files and wiki’s don’t go to the local backup. I handle them separately but they are still spread across the 3 other devices in my network

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    • Seralth@piefed.seralth.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Still don’t consider it a proper back up personally.

      It’s just not a good long term solution. A short term backup for redundancy while actively working on something sure. Just keep it local.

      But as a real actual backup? No, local doesn’t cut it.

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• ISOmorph@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I backup once a week. I have 3 backups. Everytime a new one is created, the oldest is deleted. I figured if I need to roll back something, 3 weeks is more than enough to notice.

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  • Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Back when I used OneDrive, it deleted an important but seldom used folder. It just wasn’t there anymore. No one noticed for 6 months, but luckily I had kept a backup each month so could restore it easily.

    3 weeks is definitely not long enough for me to notice something missing, if it’s just a random chunk of my 700GB of important stuff. E.g. if a folder of my kids photos from 5 years ago suddenly disappeared, I probably wouldn’t notice it for months but would be devistated to find it missing when I eventually went looking for it.

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    • ISOmorph@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I don’t host massive amounts of data. Just my contacts, calendars, grocery lists, rss feeds, that kind of stuff. All my pictures and movies are on my PC and backed up separately.

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  • passenger@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    With borg or another deduplicating solution you could (probably) fit a year of daily in less space that the source takes. Of course depends how much the data changes over time. Highly recommend pika backup as borg desktop client. You can also easily do “smart” retention where only last week is daily, then weekly, monthly, yearly.

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• DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  For configs I use Home Manager on a public Git repo. And for everything else I use Pika Backup.

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• lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I just rsync a full backup of my NAS’s entire RAID array every week to a separate machine. I have Proxmox set up with an NFS mount to the NAS where it stores all of the /data volumes that my Docker VMs and LXCs and such use (Proxmox itself is hosted on 3x office PCs, each with i7-7700/500GB SSD/32GB RAM). I don’t bother backing up the containers, so I just document which ones I’m running on occasion.

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  • HerbGrower@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Most of what I would use proxmox for doesn’t even require backing up. A copy of each VM when it is setup and possibly update that every few years would be plenty.

    I think you can export the whole VM? Using virtualbox currently which has import/export appliance. Doing that on an infrequent basis is pretty much what I would need.

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    • m4ylame0wecm@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Proxmox has backup stuff for VMs and containers which uses whatever storage youbadd (local, NFS,), and has retention settings. iirc those will always be full backups. for incremental and more, proxmox backup server (PBS VM using backupNAS as destination for me)

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• ShortN0te@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  As of now, i keep them basically for ever, but granularity gets less over time. (restic forget)

  Before you go nuts about files you want to exculde the “churn” as you said it, go ahead and actually check how much space this actually takes up. Text and especially logs are highly compressible and will most likely end up taking up almost no space.

  Be sure you backup everything you actually need, rather backup a file more then a file too less.

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  • gwheel@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Comparing daily snapshots I see 100mb+ daily churn (I assume restic diff is pre compression), the borgbase repository space usage chart shows it increasing about 50mb daily.

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• Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

  Fewer Letters	More Letters
  NVMe	Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
  VPN	Virtual Private Network
  VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

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