How often do you run backups on your system?

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Sunny@slrpnk.net⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Basically title. I’m in the process of setting up a proper backup for my configured containers on Unraid and I’m wondering how often I should run my backup script. Right now, I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent? Whats your schedule and do you strictly backup your appdata (container configs), or is there other data you include in your backups?

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infinitevalence@discuss.online ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Depends on the application. I run a nightly backup of a few VM’s because realistically they dont change much. I have containers on the other hand that run critical (to me) systems like my photo backup and they are backed up twice a day.

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truxnell@infosec.pub ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Daily backups. Currently using restic on my NixOS servers. To avoid data corruption, I make a zfs snapshot at 2am, and after that restic does a backup of my mutable data dirs both to my local Nas and CloudFlare r3. The Nas backup folder is synced to backblaze nightly as well for a more cold store.

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avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Every hour. Could do it more frequently if needed.

It depends on how resource intensive the backup process is.

Consider an 800GB Immich instance.

Using Duplicity or rsync takes 1.5 hours per backup. 99% of the time is spent in traversing the directory structure and checking which files have changed. 1% is spent into transferring the difference to the backup. Any backup system that operates on top of the file system would take this much. In addition, unless you’re using something that can take snapshots of the filesystem, you have to stop Immich during the backup process in order to prevent backing up an invalid app state.

Using ZFS send on the other hand (with syncoid) takes less than 5 seconds to discover the differences and the rest of the time is spent on the data transfer, at 100MB/s in my case.

When I used Duplicity to backup, I would backup once week because the backup process was long and heavy on the disk array. Since I switched to ZFS send, I do it once an hour because there’s almost no visible impact.

I’m now in the process of migrating my laptop to ZFS on root in order to be able to utilize ZFS send for regular full system backups. If successful, eventually I’ll move all my machines to ZFS on root.

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papertowels@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
And equally important, how do you do your backups? What system and to where?

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AMillionMonkeys@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I tried Kopia but it was unstable and janky, so now it’s whenever I remember to manually run a bunch of rsync. I backup my desktop to cold storage on the first of the month, so I should get in the habit of backing up my server to the NAS then also.

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ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Depends on the system but weekly at least

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Jozav@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Using Kopia, backups are made multiple times per day to Google drive. Only changes are transferred.

Configurations are backed up once per week and manually, stored 4 weeks. Websites and NextCloud data is backed up every hour and stored for a year (although I’m doing this only 7 months now).

Kopia is magic, recommended!

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