[Discuss] Linux backups in 2019

[David Kramer]

I decided to move away from differential backups, because my focus is 
always on ease of recovery, and if I find a problem that happened in the 
past, I would rather have one thing to restore.

I'm moving away from external hard drives for backups too. Either you 
leave them hooked up so backups happen automatically, but the drives are 
constantly spinning, or you leave them disconnected so they last longer 
but backups have to be manual.  I found that Google Cloud works out 
insanely cheap (like 20-ish cents a month) for files you're going to 
upload any maybe never retrieve.  I encrypt the tarred backups with 
openssl before sending them.

I'll also mention that on my Linode server (not my desktop) I have 
separate backup scripts for DB, mail, and system files, because I backup 
and retain them at different rates.  In doing all of this, I created a 
backuplib.sh with functions that can be used by the other scripts to 
reduce duplication of work.

On 11/9/19 11:47 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> A couple of months ago my desktop root got trashed (my fault while
> preparing for installfest). In the past I used rsnapshot and Back In Time.
> Both create snapshots using rsync with the link-dest option such that
> existing files are hard linked. I run these as root since I backup parts of
> things like /etc /usr/local /home (with multiple users). I would like to
> know what others might be using and what they think of it. I do want to
> keep the snapshot format where duplicate files are hard linked. Note that
> my destination is a mounted removable hard drive.
>