Right now I’m creating a nightly restic snapshot of my server on borgbase and on some spare drives, and keeping the snapshots forever. There’s a ton of daily churn in my data though, between databases and logs and other files that don’t constitute ‘real data’ but might be needed to restore the app.
Always last daily, weekly, monthly. The others are pointers (hardlinks). How many years, i’m not there yet.
For configs I use Home Manager on a public Git repo. And for everything else I use Pika Backup.
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.
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.
I just
rsynca 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/[userdata]volumes that my VMs and LXCs use; Proxmox itself is hosted on 3x office PCs, each with i7-7700/500GB SSD/32GB RAM, and set up for replication in case one goes down. On occasion I’ll actually document which services I’m using, so I don’t really bother backing those up since the userdata itself can be remapped to a new instance.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.
where we’re going, we don’t need backups!
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.
Backups?
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.
I have daily backups, weekly, monthly and yearly. All but yearly is deleted after a certain time, but yearly I keep forever.
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.
I suppose I could do more, but I also want the privacy policy of my online services to say: x weeks and all the logs and unnecessary data is gone.
I just buy new HDDs.
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.
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.
The drives are crazy expensive if you want to use a somewhat recent generation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*edit: It also gives me peace of mind knowing that I can encrypt my stuff to my liking. Silly me I forgot to actually look at the encryption tool I used, I just did a search and found age was highly suggested. It is coded in Go, sure it is open source and all that I am just not a fan of the language.
Ah yeah makes sense if it’s not just for storing an offsite copy of backups like mine is.
Daily for 10 days, 4 weekly, 4 monthly.
That covers me from broken updates, generally.
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.
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?
because your last weekly would be a max of 7 days out
How am I going to restore day 8, day 9, or day 10 backups if I only keep 7 days?
How do you restore on day 11, 12 or 13 if you only keep 10 days?
I don’t need days after 10. I need days up to 10.
look im not that committed to a different scheme. Just seems to me once you get to a week and do a weekly you are good on days. heck I would do 6 daily ones and have the weekly one just be the 7th day of the week. free up yet another deep backup.
Haha OK bud
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.
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.
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.
