I have a server running Debian with 24 TB of storage. I would ideally like to back up all of it, though much of it is torrents, so only the ones with low seeders really need backed up. I know about the 321 rule but it sounds like it would be expensive. What do you do for backups? Also if anyone uses tape drives for backups I am kinda curious about that potentially for offsite backups in a safe deposit box or something.
TLDR: title.
Edit: You have mentioned borg and rsync, and while borg looks good, I want to go with rsync as it seems to be more actively maintained. I would like to also have my backups encrypted, but rsync doesn’t seem to have that built in. Does anyone know what to do for encrypted backups?
I am simple man s I use rsync.
Setup a mergerfs drive pool of about 60 TiB and rsync weekly.
Rsync seems daunting at first but then you realize how powerful and most importantly reliable it is.
It’s important that you try to restore your backups from time to time.
One of the main reasons why I avoid softwares such as Kopia or Borg or Restic or whatever is in fashion:
FWIW restic repository format already has two independent implementations. Restic (in Go) and Rustic (Rust), so the chances of both going unmaintained is hopefully pretty low.
I was heavily considering borg but I just looked up rsync and it looks like everything I need. Thank you.
Edit: Actually encryption would also be nice. Is there any way to do that with rsync?
Yes. You compose a crypted vault over your storage vault. I pay about $1/mo for B2 Backblaze. Around 150G last I checked.
what other people are saying, is that you rsync over an encrypted file system or other type of storages. What are your backup targets? in my case I own the disks so I use LUKS partition -> ext4 -> mergerfs to end up with a single volume I can mount on a folder
Going unmaintained is a non issue, since you can still restore from your backup. It is not like a subscription or proprietary software which is no longer usable when you stop to pay for it or the company owning goes down.
The design of restic is quite simple and easy to understand. The original dev gave multiple talks about it, quite interesting.
Imho the additional features of dedup, encryption and versioning outweigh the points you mentioned by far.
Until they hit a hard bug or don’t support newer transport formats or scenarios. Also the community dries up eventually
That is why you test your backuo. It is unrealiatic, that in a stable software release there is suddenly, after you tested your backup a hard bug which prevents recovery.
Yes unmaintained software will not support new featueres.
I think you misunderstood me. You should not use unmaintained software as your backup tool, but IMO it is no problem when it suddenly goes unmaintained, your backup will most likely still work. Same with any other software, that goes unmaintained, look for an alternative.
How is unrealistic? Think of this:
We talk about software that is considered stable. That has verification checks for the backup. Used by thousands of ppl. It is unrealistic.