I am using duplicati and thinking of switching to Borg. What do you use and why?

  • Fryboyter@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    There is no such thing as the objectively best solution. Each tool has advantages and disadvantages. And every user has different preferences and requirements.

    Personally, I am using Borg for years. And I have had to restore data several times, which has worked every time.

    In addition to Borg, you can also look at Borgmatic. This wrapper extends the functionality and makes some things easier.

    And if you want to use a graphical user interface, you can have a look at Vorta or Pika.

    • privsecfoss@feddit.dkOP
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      1 year ago

      Agree. Should say ‘best for you’. Cool thanks. I know of Vorta which I intended of using. Gonna read up on the other ones.

    • TedvdB@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      Oh I love borg backups and the ability to script it.

      I’m making encrypted backups of a lot of servers this way, including a Lemmy instance.

  • CjkOvPDwQW@lemmy.pt
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    1 year ago

    Using borg backup, just because there are some nice frontends for the gnome ecosystem (when I am using gnome, I love to use gnome apps), and it has a nice cmd for scripting when using something else (using it on servers)

  • flux@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Kopia has served me great. I back up to my local Ceph S3 storage and then keep a second clone of that on a raid.

    Kopiahas good performance and miltiple hosts can back up tp it concurrently while preserving deduplication – unlike borgbackup.

    • 𝜏au@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been using Kopia on my desktop computer for a few years now to do cloud backups. It’s generally working well and I haven’t found anything else with the same combination of features yet.

      That said, kopia-ui is still a bit finicky and I’ve managed to bork a repo beyond repair a few times (e.g. once because my cloud provider account ran out of space, leading to some kind of inconsistent state) and there are some oddities, like the regular “periodic maintenance” (it’s a bit weird that it’s needed in the first place) randomly failing or taking forever.

    • aliens@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      Kopia has been working great for me as well. It’s simple, versatile and reliable. I previously used Duplicati but kept running into jobs failing for no reason, backup configurations missing randomly and simple restores taking hours. It was a hot mess and I’m happy I switched.

      • Parsnip8904@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I want to love kopia but the command line syntax feels unnatural to me. I don’t know why either. For the whole month I test drove it, I had to look up every single time how to do something. Contrast this with restic which is less featureful in some ways but a few days in it felt like I was just using git.

        • aliens@infosec.pub
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          1 year ago

          I never used the command line with Kopia besides starting it up in server mode and used the web based GUI to configure, it was pretty simple to get everything setup that way. You may want to give it another try using Kopia in that mode.

            • flux@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              You can use the web ui remotely.

              Personally I use it from command line, though, and my only complaint is that it’s too easy to start a backup you didn’t intend to… Buut if you’re careful about usong the kopia snapshot command then it’s fine.

              • Parsnip8904@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                Oh I thought the webui was only for server mode.

                I just quickly glanced through the manuals of both restic and kopia. I think my trouble with kopia is that its style feels kind of weird. I’m just not able to wrap my head around it well.

                kopia snapshot create /dir is shorter but more confusing than restic -r repo backup /dir

  • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    I don’t have backups. :/

    And I will regret it some day.

    I use github for code so that’s backed up though.

  • I_Am_Jacks_____@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been using restic. It has built-in dedup & encryption and supports both local and remote storage. I’m using it to back up to a local restic-server (pointing to a USB drive) and Backblaze B2.

    Restores for single or small sets of files is easy: restic -r $REPO mount /mnt Then browse through the filesystem view of your snapshots and copy just like any other filesystem.

  • derek@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago
    • Btrfs for local system backups based on snapshots
    • Photoprism for photos
    • Syncthing for other media
    • flux@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      You will reconsider calling strategy a backup should the filesystem get corrupted for whatever reason.

      I’ve tested my full system backup restore once with btrfs. Worked out fine.

      • derek@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Maybe Photoprism isn’t a backup strategy, but Syncthing for sure is, because you can have multiple backup units in it.

        I’m additionally use software RAID on one of devices, that receives Syncthing backups.

  • JohannesOliver@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Multiple. Locally I have Timeshift doing btrfs snapshots every so often. This is mostly to roll back to a snapshot if something breaks. I’ve never had to use it (and probably should).

    I use Pika backup every once in a while for a local backup to an external drive. Mostly because it’s easy to restore quickly.

    I have duplicacy doing backups to a cloud provider. I used to use duplicati for this, and it was fine - although I didn’t like that it seems to be forever in beta. I like that duplicacy can do deduplication between backups of different machines which most other solutions I’ve seen cannot. I like its selection of cloud providers vs Borg/Vorta and some others.

  • esm@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    What problem are you trying to solve? Please think about that, and about your backup strategy, before you decide on any specific tools.

    For example, here are several scenarios that I guard against in my backup strategy:

    • Accidentally delete a file, I want to recover it quickly (snapshots);
    • Entire drive goes kablooie, I want my system to continue running without downtime (RAID)
    • User data drive goes kablooie, I want to recover (many many options)
    • Root drive goes kablooie, I want to recover (baremetal recovery tools)
    • House burns down or computer is damaged/stolen (offsite backups)
  • flatbield@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Just a reminder. Consider and test your restore process as well. Backups without restore testing are kind of questionable. Also think how the restore will go. Do you want to do a bare metal restore, or will you just reinstall, and restore certain things for example. Lot of these backup methods will not get a true bare metal restore set, nor can file system backups be “perfect” if they are done on a running system. Databases and things like cryptfs mounts for example can be problematic for example. Nor do all tools necessarily backup the full structure of the file system.

    Not saying these are always issues, just be aware of them.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    I use my own scripts with rsync etc, I don’t back up my OS itself since I have installing it automated with scripts as well. I just back up specific things I need with my scripts.

    • PoisonedPrisonPanda@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      automated with scripts

      would you like to share those or do you have references for creating such scripts? this is on my to do list since years but I always struggle where to begin with.

      • ipkpjersi@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        They’re very personalized to my setup, so they’re not particularly useful in a general sense - I’d recommend something more like using this guide which seems to be pretty good: https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-use-rsync-remote-backup-linux-system

        Learning bash has been great for me, it’s helped a ton being able to automate so many different things even just like installing and configuring specific applications to work the way I want, etc

        I think a script to manually run for manual backups plus a different script to run for automatic backups scheduled via cronjob is a great way to go.

  • GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’ve tried alternatives but I’ve stuck with LuckyBackup even though there have not been any updates for a while:

    1. It’s rsync based - which is updated
    2. It has masses of GUI options including various include/exclude options, pre- and post-commands, etc.
    3. It’s simple - I can browse inside the backed files and see what is going on, or just restore back one or two files.
    4. It updates cron itself.