Backup/Restore best practices?

General system Newbie
5

No, git is a version control system, not a backup solution.

There are basically two solutions I use:

  1. Simply copy the files onto a different drive and verify the checksum. This is good for stuff that never changes, you back it up once (multiple times) and you never overwrite that backup, you treat it as read-only. rsync is excellent for that, that’s what I use.

  2. Borg backup. This is for stuff that changes, stuff you’re working on. You make backups of it on some schedule, daily, weekly, monthly, depending on how often it changes. Such data is vulnerable to file corruption, so simply copying it over the old backup is dangerous, as you can replace a file with its corrupted version and not know about it. Borg solves this problem, as it is an incremental backup solution, so you can restore old versions of any file, before possible corruption. The downside is that it’s not as simple as just copying files over, but the additional complication is well worth it, in my opinion.

I never use any “cloud”-based backup. The “cloud” is just an Orwellian term for “somebody else’s computer”.

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