[Discuss] Linux backups

[Rich Pieri]

On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 15:07:00 -0500
Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux at gmail.com> wrote:

> For the laptop, I'm considering either back in time or another
> backup. And Dropbox is installed on my laptop. Unlike the tower, the
> laptop will be turned off frequently, and also the backup device will
> be an SSD. So, is like a backup that can wake up on boot and detect
> if the backup device is mounted, but can be restricted to 1 backup a
> day. Back in time can detect if the device is mounted, but I just
> want recommendation for some other backup systems you have used.

The two pre-rolled tools I use are restic and Relax-and-Recover. The
former for file backups; the later for turnkey bare-metal recovery.
Neither have on-boot run per se but that's fixable with a simple cron
entry and a wrapper:

# sleep 120 seconds after boot is complete then run backup wrapper
@reboot sleep 120 && /path/to/backup/wrapper

And then your wrapper does mount detection, etc.

restic doesn't have a limit option but instead has pruning options. For
example:

# prune down to the most recent 5 snapshots
restic ${OPTIONS} forget --keep-last 5 --prune --repo /path/to/repo

ReaR is a turnkey disaster recovery system rather than a traditional
backup system, and doesn't really do multiple backups. I think if you
use any of the tar backends it will keep one previous version but I
don't remember off-hand how that works or how to control it.

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