Which Backup / Imaging System for 2022?

What’s this ?

Looks interesting when seen for first time.

So, here’s what I do. I’ve spent enough time doing enterprise backups and having them fail not because the backups failed but because the person asking for the backups didn’t actually know what needed to be backed up, so snapshots are always a part of the strategy. For them to be real backups rather than redundancy though, they have to be stored off the system. So, work environment, there’s periodic file backups to tape, and VM snapshots to tape, just in case.

Home environment, there’s btrfs snapshots to proivide rollback options for redundancy, and all document folders (including game saves, photos, etc) get synced to the cloud. There’s also a monthly tgz to an external drive (when it was Windows it was a zip).

The important part is to NOT have a self-contained system. Disasters happen.

My strategy id simple:

  1. BTRFS snapshots for system. (No data) They are taken with snapper, are bootable with GRUB and are not duplicated. I restore snapshots quite frequently.
  2. Rsync backups of system to external drive. (No data) If I do something stupid (like rm -rf) I have an untouched state of system.
  3. Manually copying data to external drive. If my internal disk ever decides to die, my data will stay with me.
    I dual boot and pretty much all data and games reside on Windows 10 partition so /home is never backed up.
    I have only 1 internal and 1 external drive, so loss of location may cause some problems, though data loss would be the last thing I care about in such a situation :sweat_smile:

CryptoSteal is more like it, for a 170 Euro steel tube. :thinking:

Looks great, but the storage capacity is a bit on the low side: under 55 bytes.

That’s about 3 euros per byte. I would need about 80 billion of these pipes (costing about 13 trillion euros), to back up the latest HDD I bought (for about 120 euros).

rofl

It is expensive for me.

Also, I just found it to match @keybreak 's capsule post.
:sweat_smile:

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Yeah, 13 trillion euros is a bit outside my price range, too. I just bought a harpsichord.

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That does not make much sense from my point of view. If the drive fails your ext4 partition will be gone too. If you want to save some data as a precaution to a different parition you should use a different drive for that new “precaution” partition.

With all this discussions about backup you have to keep in mind why you need a backup and what actually can cause data loss. The two most important reasons for data loss are (1) human mistake and (2) drive failure.

A snapshot can help you when you do a mistake, for example by accidentally deleting a file or a folder. But a drive failure is a complete loss of all data incl. snapshots. This can only be mitigated with a backup on a different drive.

I for example have my live data in my PC on a raid10 system (2x2 drives) and I do frequent backups to an external raidz2 system (8 drives). I am paranoid about data loss because I am an amateur photographer and loosing all my pictures is a nightmare that keeps me awake at night :joy:

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Your advice is right. External storage is the best approach.

Timeshift daily snapshot
rsync /home to my NAS every night
rsync some of /home to root disk / partition to get picked up by Dropbox (things that cannot get lost if my house burns down)
Monthly (when I don’t snooze the reminder) Clonezilla

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