How do y'all like to do backups? (Linux and beyond)

petrosophia

I don't have a robust backup solution in place right now, unfortunately. I've got two Kubuntu laptops and one Ubuntu home server with almost no redundancy right now, and I'd really like to fix that.

Does anyone have recommendations for open source solutions for scheduled backups to a local network location?

I'm also interested in any ways to back up a couple of Android phones in a more-or-less seamless way. I've got stuff like photos set to automatically back up to my self-hosted Ente instance as well as my Proton Drive, but if I could get more backed up regularly, that would be cool. I'm way less in the know on Android stuff these days, though.

AndyH

petrosophia

I'm a big fan of Restic for backups. My setup has a cronjob. Restic supports lots of storage options including self-hosted and cloud.

petrosophia

AndyH I've heard of that one! I ran into a piece of software called Backrest that works on top of Restic, but I haven't sat down to really work it all out yet.

I probably need to rearrange where all my data is stored on the server so I can use some of my disks more effectively as backups. I've got 26 TB in total, but it's all spread out, so it's harder to back up appropriately.

skrlet13

For manual local folders backups, I like using FreeFileSync. Compatible with SFTP and FTP too. I use it for cold storage.

For online files, I prefer Nextcloud.

drmollytov

I'm still partying like cloud storage doesn't exist, lol.

I have:

a 64GB thumb drive that carries my current work,
a 256GB thumb drive that gets a copy of the 64GB plus whatever is stored locally on my machines at least once a week,
two 2TB drives that get a file dump from the 256 once a month (I do this when I pay bills at the end of the month). One drive lives in the fire safe and the other on my desk.

My phone backs itself up to a microSD card, which also gets dumped to the big drives monthly. I tend to delete stuff from my phone once it's moved to the drives.

I don't have home broadband anymore, so file synching and cloud use just don't make sense for me. I don't find this system hard to use now that it's part of my end of month routine.

Hiya

I use urbackup, which is an open source client/server backup system. It backs up Linux, Windows, Mac and can handle bare-metal restores. However, Android is not supported. For a small fee, there is an add-on that speeds up Windows backups significantly by tracking changed blocks on the client's disks.

petrosophia

I was recently introduced to borgbackup, which seems pretty handy, especially as a scriptable tool.