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.

  • 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.

    • aliens
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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
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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

  • 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)

  • 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.

  • karce@wizanons.dev
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    1 year ago

    I use btrfs snapshots and btrbk

    btrfs is a great filesystem and btrbk complements it easily. Switching between snapshots is also really easy if something goes wrong and you need to restore.

    Archwiki docs for btrfs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Incremental_backup_to_external_drive

    Of course you’d still want a remote location to backup to. You can use an encrypted volume with cloud storage. So google drive, etc all work.

  • professed@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I started using Timeshift when it was included with a distro I was using and haven’t had reason to shift away from it. Have already used it once to do a full restore.

  • 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)
  • 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.

  • 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.
  • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    I just use a script on an systemd timer. Well two scripts on two timers really - one running daily, one weekly for different data. It’s just a bunch of rsync commands copying folders to an hdd in my system and I reroute the output into a simple log file, mainly to verify if it ran at all. I am a bit paranoid about that. I can also run it manually whenever I want. Oh and some of the data I also rsync again to a smb cloud drive from Hetzner. I do not keep multiple versions and I delete remote files that have been deleted locally. It’s just a 1:1 copy.
    Oh and I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed so I have auto configured btrfs snapshots. Though I have not needed them yet and could not even say how I can use those. I figure that out once I need them.

  • 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.