I don’t mean system files, but your personal and work files. I have been using Mint for a few years, I use Timeshift for system backups, but archived my personal files by hand. This got me curious to see what other people use. When you daily drive Linux what are your preferred tools to keep backups? I have thousands of pictures, family movies, documents, personal PDFs, etc. that I don’t want to lose. Some are cloud backed but rather haphazardly. I would like to use a more systematic approach and use a tool that is user friendly and easy to setup and program.
I do 2 backups
Veeam system image daily; this is a fully bootable image of every drive on my system, kept for things like hardware failure or “oops” moments. It just goes to my NAS for fast local storage.
Online backup of important files daily; this has changed a few times, I was using Restic to B2, then Duplicati to Wasabi S3, now I’m using iDrive to see how that is.
My favorite tools are definitely Veeam and Duplicati, because they both have a good UI and are easy to use, both automatically run in the background and handle scheduling entirely on their own. Browsing snapshots is easy and finding the files you want at a specific date/time is quick.
Restic and Kopia I’ve used as well, they’re much harder to use especially for restores, finding files is a nightmare via CLI. Scheduling is a pretty involved step, and you have to figure out how to run them in the background yourself. Both also performed really slowly for me on my ~3TB backup set of about 50k files, compared to Veeam and Duplicati which are very fast.
+1 for Veeam. I am a backup administrator and this is our tool of choice. I use it for my home machines as well and it works great.
Just remember, you don’t have a backup unless you have tested it.
I’ve found Restic great once dialed in. I have a systemd service run backups automatically. Super fast thanks to only backing up diffs; only the initial backup is slow.
Yes making a script and service isn’t for everyone.
Finding files in the backup is easy… you just mount the backup and search any way you want, just like any other directory. Not sure why that’s hard?
I’ve found restores really slow mostly, initial backups are slow but not too bad.
As far as mounting the backup and searching it, mostly it’s just a lot of steps to remember.
Ah. I also made another script where I type loadbackup in bash and everything is just there. I guess I’ve just made it easier for myself lol.
I also load Restic variables in bash so I’m not typing out paths etc. Password is kept in gnome keyring and is requested automatically.
I forget the annoying steps cause I’ve had this for awhile.