Right now I’m creating a nightly restic snapshot of my server on borgbase and on some spare drives, and keeping the snapshots forever. There’s a ton of daily churn in my data though, between databases and logs and other files that don’t constitute ‘real data’ but might be needed to restore the app.
Daily for 10 days, 4 weekly, 4 monthly.
That covers me from broken updates, generally.
came to say something like this but not sure why you would do daily for 10 days. Your doing weeklys so why not 7. I would rather increase the monthly to 7 or do 6 bi monthly and keep a yearly.
Your doing weeklys so why not 7
They are all daily backups, those schedules I pointed out are for pruning. And I don’t understand the question… How would keeping 7 instead of 10 dailies help me?
because your last weekly would be a max of 7 days out
How am I going to restore day 8, day 9, or day 10 backups if I only keep 7 days?
How do you restore on day 11, 12 or 13 if you only keep 10 days?
I don’t need days after 10. I need days up to 10.
look im not that committed to a different scheme. Just seems to me once you get to a week and do a weekly you are good on days. heck I would do 6 daily ones and have the weekly one just be the 7th day of the week. free up yet another deep backup.
Haha OK bud
As long as I have space. My backups are on dedicated drives, and as they run out of space the old ones are deleted.
I guess OPs question is more about what makes you comfortable.
Is your drive only big enough for 2 backups or is it big enough for hundreds? If it was half that size would you still be happy with the number of backups? A quarter of the size?
Kinda depends on what it’s for. My server? IDK, 2 days. Maybe have a dedicated weekly/monthly backup left behind. PC? Honestly just the latest is fine.
But it’s a 10tb drive, so I’ve got months of backups even if they’re running continuously. It’s less a how comfortable I am and more a how much can I afford. (a lot more before the shortage)
I also explicitly purge stuff that’s constantly changing like logs. I don’t care for logs in my backups. Only on the live machine.
I have about 750GB of irreplaceable files on my server so I want a really solid history. A couple of days backup is no where near enough to give me peace of mind 😅
3 2 1 offsite backups typically happen a lot less often than local copies or local backups.
I also don’t really consider any machines data to be irreplaceable. If I lose my phone I want the latest backup. But taxes or photos I care for? Those are an entirely different backup, and those aren’t incremental. They’re just what they are.
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I was backing up multiple places on my LAN but than half of my place flooded, so lamenat and carpet was ripped up, one of my pi 5’s was misplaced with a NVMe drive and another was lost. Than just down the street 3 house went up in flames had the wind been blowing just a little south my condo complex would have been burnt to the ground. After the fire fighters were telling us to get back further and further I had my main pi 5 that had all the backups of everything important on another NVMe drive and a few other things ready to go if the firefighters started banging on my door telling me it was time to leave. I wish I could honestly say that was the day I decided to get a VPS and start my back up, but I was still hoping my father would let me set up a pi with a drive big enough to do back ups at his place. It sounds like he will but he is concerned about security risks about my VPN, funny thing is my back up pi would be the most secure thing hooked up to his modem/router and I wouldn’t want his stuff touching my stuff and with how my LAN and VPN are set up they would have a hard time doing it. Anywho I have a domain hosted by EasyDNS, and just went and looked at their VPS options and got some year long plan and set up cron jobs to take the stuff I want to backup and use age to encrypt it and than it is sent to my VPS each age container is than deleted after there is something of the same name but 3 days iterations older and deletes it.
Is using a VPS cost effective compared to uploading to object storage?
I use rclone to sync backups to Backblaze object storage. I find it hard to believe a VPS would be cheaper, considering the disk space on those can be very expensive compared to object storage.
If it was just for backup backblaze is probably less expensive but my LAN consists mostly of pi’s and hand me down computers. I am slowly moving things around on my LAN so to each their own I guess. I like the idea of having more control over my stuff so having a whole Debian system on the other end feels right for me.
Ah yeah makes sense if it’s not just for storing an offsite copy of backups like mine is.
I backup once a week. I have 3 backups (in 2 locations). Everytime a new one is created, the oldest is deleted. I figured if I need to roll back something, 3 weeks is more than enough to notice.
With borg or another deduplicating solution you could (probably) fit a year of daily in less space that the source takes. Of course depends how much the data changes over time. Highly recommend pika backup as borg desktop client. You can also easily do “smart” retention where only last week is daily, then weekly, monthly, yearly.
Back when I used OneDrive, it deleted an important but seldom used folder. It just wasn’t there anymore. No one noticed for 6 months, but luckily I had kept a backup each month so could restore it easily.
3 weeks is definitely not long enough for me to notice something missing, if it’s just a random chunk of my 700GB of important stuff. E.g. if a folder of my kids photos from 5 years ago suddenly disappeared, I probably wouldn’t notice it for months but would be devistated to find it missing when I eventually went looking for it.
I don’t host massive amounts of data. Just my contacts, calendars, grocery lists, rss feeds, that kind of stuff. All my pictures and movies are on my PC and backed up separately.
I have daily backups, weekly, monthly and yearly. All but yearly is deleted after a certain time, but yearly I keep forever.
I just
rsynca full backup of my NAS’s entire RAID array every week to a separate machine. I have Proxmox set up with an NFS mount to the NAS where it stores all of the/[userdata]volumes that my VMs and LXCs use; Proxmox itself is hosted on 3x office PCs, each with i7-7700/500GB SSD/32GB RAM, and set up for replication in case one goes down. On occasion I’ll actually document which services I’m using, so I don’t really bother backing those up since the userdata itself can be remapped to a new instance.Most of what I would use proxmox for doesn’t even require backing up. A copy of each VM when it is setup and possibly update that every few years would be plenty.
I think you can export the whole VM? Using virtualbox currently which has import/export appliance. Doing that on an infrequent basis is pretty much what I would need.
Proxmox has backup stuff for VMs and containers which uses whatever storage youbadd (local, NFS,), and has retention settings. iirc those will always be full backups. for incremental and more, proxmox backup server (PBS VM using backupNAS as destination for me)
I know I’ll get shot for this, but I stopped backing up a long time ago.
I was doing it at home because I do it at work and it’s the done thing. But when I stopped to think about it, I realised I don’t have anything at home that actually matters. If I lose my Plex library it’s ok.
How long do you keep your backups?
Yes, I have that exernal HDD lying around somewhere near the PC, and it was at least 4 or 5 times that I backed up a lot of files on it.
I think I keep it for more than 10 years now.
I learned I pretty much never need old data for my hobby selfhosting stuff. So I do 4 weeks. I’ll notice if something breaks within 4 weeks and fix it. I occasionally do manual backups, for example when migrating stuff and keep them for longer. And I got some old stuff like in xkcd 1360.
I suppose I could do more, but I also want the privacy policy of my online services to say: x weeks and all the logs and unnecessary data is gone.
Zero or one backups depending on the type of data generally.
For a system if it can’t be redeployed from a list of requirements then I Foundationally ducked up. It means either I’m depending on something fragile, unknowable or over complicated.
Raw data on the other hand goes on a raid array. If I need more redundancy then that, then a single extra off site backup on a cd or something.
A back up on the same drive as the original isn’t a backup. It’s a waste of space, and a stupid idea.
A system that requires excessive nonsense is not reliable.
If I have a on and off site back up and both fail. Then either the world is literally fucking on fire and it doesn’t matter. Or someone dropped a bomb on my storage.
Either way I have bigger problems at that point.
A back up on the same drive as the original isn’t a backup. It’s a waste of space, and a stupid idea.
It’s a backup that helps against software errors, but not against drive failures. Depending on what you want to achieve, it’s a perfectly valid strategy.
I generally have Operating System backups that are stored on the same drive. Those backups are immediately copied to 3 different devices, my computer and two other drives
The backup on the local drive is useful for when I’m tinkering, making adjustments, adding or removing stuff. Restoring from that local backup is far more convenient than using the remote backups
I don’t use anything with a database so all my static media files and wiki’s don’t go to the local backup. I handle them separately but they are still spread across the 3 other devices in my network
I just buy new HDDs.
Unironically how I use LTO-6 tapes.
2.5TB of storage for ~$5/tape on ebay.
Never delete anything. If the authorities ever come after me, discovery is going to be hilarious.
What’s the catch, why don’t we use those? I/O speed? Limited read/write cycles? I imagine it sucks if you need files on opposite ends of the tape.
The tapes are $5 but the drive was $400.
It’s linear, so you have to pull a whole backup at a time, but it is possible to store multiple unique backups on a single tape, and only pull one.
The drives are crazy expensive if you want to use a somewhat recent generation.
Let me put it this way: I have a removable harddisk with my files from the universities’ VAX 11/780 in storage. Long enough?
[forget] keep-daily = 10 keep-weekly = 4Daily backups are cheap because of de-duplication. I keep a few weekly backups in case it takes me a bit to notice something went wrong. I don’t usually back up logs.
I could probably drop the weekly backups without much risk, but I’ve got the space.
