What are the advantages/disadvantages of the different backup solutions?

Submitted ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨sbeak@sopuli.xyz⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Lots of people have mentioned rsynx, restic, borgbackup, and others, but which would be best for backing up nextcloud, immich, and radicale? Do all of them have a method of automatically backing up every X days/weeks? Why use one over the other, what are the differences?

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un_ax@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Here are some features off the top of my head that some backups software might have that other don’t, or that you’ll want to consider when choosing or making a system:

Application aware backups: E.G. DB Backups without shutting down the database. Could also be hypervisor/container awareness.

Restore: The ability to automatically restore files, systems, possibly to a new location.

Application aware restore/browsing: Being able to pull individual files from a backup, or accounts from a directory system

Backup copy: Automatically copying the backup to multiple destinations, disk or S3.

Retention: Automatically keeping a set number of backups, often including a number of weekly or monthly historical long term copies.

Backup Diffs: Keeping backups in a way that you only store the data changed rather than a full copy.

Compression: Compressing the stored data

Immutability: Keeping backups in a way that allows a (usually cloud) storage provider to lock files for X amount of days to prevent malicious deletions

Encryption: Encrypting your backups if they’re kept on someone else’s infrastructure or a non-secured area

Verification: Checking that the backups are intact and not corrupt.

Control panel: A single place to view the progress and completeness of all backups

Alerts: Notifications for failed backups, or hooks for successful backups for healthchecks.

Virus scans: Making sure a backups is malware-free before restore.

Retries: Ability to retry backups or copies in case of temporary outages before sending alerts

I’m not sure which of these exist in free software, my experience is mostly on enterprise software. A backups system can be as simple as a rsync/zip cron job or a full integrated system depending on what you need.
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- Coelacanthus@lemmy.kde.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And snapshot can benefit backup. Since some software need to be shudown to do backup, minimize the down time is important. The snapshot can make down time is almost stop and restart time, and the software can be online again and we can do backup on snapshot in background.
  
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Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I use restic in combination with rsync.

Two days ago, I tried to setup unbound and fucked up my Nextcloud instance on the same host.

Restic restored /opt, /etc, /home and /var and then I used rsync to divvy them all out. For some reason, restic didn’t recognize the --delete flag so, rsync it was.

Reboot, waited 3 minutes, reload, there’s my Nextcloud login screen. Database cleaned up using occ commands and I’m back.

My restic repo sits on my main NAS, and a copy of it on another system. It holds all of my host’s aforementioned directories for easy setup and restore from either bad luck or dumb ideas.

…usually dumb ideas.

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fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
ZFS. Since it backs up at block level, moving giant files means you onoy send a few K for the backup, unlike other solutions like rsync, etc.

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starshipwinepineapple@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Haven’t used all of those but my recommendation would be to just start trying them. Start small, get a feel for it and expand usage or try a different backup solution. You should be able to do automatic backups for any of them either directly or setting up your own timer/cron jobs (which is how i do it with rsync).

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The_Zen_Cow_Says_Mu@infosec.pub ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I use borg (borgmatic) to back up home server to home nas. The only major disadvantage of borg is that it requires running borg also on the receiving end, so it doesn’t work with a lot of cloud storage providers like S3.

Restic can work with most everything as a backup target.

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JoeKrogan@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I do monthly backups with cron and tar and syncthing for my containers.

I do quarterly backups of my server (14TB) to external USB HDDs. This is done via a script that mounts the drives, runs rsync to copy, then unmounts the drives again and emails me when it is done. I dont bother encrypting them as it ia mainly just media.

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confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I personally use rsync since I do most my work by command line these days. It’s taken nearly half a year really understand it but it offers the flexibility I desire.

I have a small network with only a handful of devices. I keep all my incremental backups on encrypted partitions and encrypted detachable SSD’s which I manually decrypt. Rsync is set up to use SSH so there’s some form of encrypted transfers but that’s not actually a priority for me, just an added benefit.

I also use rsync to sync files and directories while maintaining additional system attributes across multiple systems. That is to say, what’s root or user accessible stays root or user accessible after the transfer is complete.

If I desired more protection, I’d probably look into Borg backup. Currently I just use encryption as an annoyance deterrence method. I also stick to the base Rsync command because every other option I tried brought with it complexities which have all failed me. I at least have a high level confidence in my backup/restore process now.

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nfreak@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not sure about other options but Backrest has worked wonderfully for me since day 1. Basically just a GUI for Restic. My only complaints are that jobs can’t be assigned to multiple repos and you can’t edit a job’s name or repo once created. Aside from those quirks, it works fine - I have daily, weekly, monthly, and manual jobs set up across both servers and my desktop, basically just set it and forget it.

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- JessieGearGirl@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Highly highly recommend Backrest!
  
  restic is great but I’m not the best at scripts and JSON and crontab and whatever
  
  Backrest puts the amazing restic right up front with a gui. Add in healthchecks.io webhooks (literally copy and paste setup) and it’s my go-to backup solution hands-down
  
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- napkin2020@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s a GUI and a bit more than that. Restic’s biggest pain point is that periodic runs have to be set up manually. Backrest does that for you.
  
  Although I’m using resticprofile, just because it also works(and has a nice web hook support) but I also use backrest and I highly recommend it.
  
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FlexibleToast@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I use borg with borgmatic. Heck, if you’re using Nextcloud AIO, borg is built in. It uses rsync, and takes incremental, deduplicated backups. I like it because it’s mostly just setting up ssh and a config file.

More specifically I use Nextcloud’s built in borg and these two containers:

Borgmatic

Borgserver

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- Lem453@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This along with borg warehouse is the GOAT setup. Many others exist of course.
  
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- Zachariah@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Vorta is an awesome front end to Borg for machines with a gui.
  
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- HelloRoot@lemy.lol ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  borgwarehouse.com
  
  this is also nice instead of borgserver. Then you can add new clients via web GUI.
  
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  - FlexibleToast@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well, this looks really cool. Thanks
    
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doeknius_gloek@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The question you’re asking is too broad. Every tool somehow differs from the others, but listing all differences requires in-depth knowledge of each tool and a lot of time.

At the end of the day, every tool somehow backs up your data. CLI interfaces, encryption algorithms, deduplications logic, supported backends, underlying programming languages and a lot more may differ. Identify what’s most important to you, test different solutions and then use the tool that works best for your use-case.

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uranibaba@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I am currently looking into borg because it can take incremental backups. I just need figure out how I should handle a running system, if I need to turn of all my docker images or if there is some kind of snapshot function I can use.

From what I read on their FAQ, Borg cannot verify the integrity so I would need to turn everything off during the backup process. A filesystem like ZFS could have solved that problem (cannot find the link, something about shadow copy I think?) but since I don’t have a backup yet nor physical access, I need to work with what I have.

I think I will set it to take a backup every night.

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