I confess I don’t know where this should go on the forums. It does not seem to fit into any of the sub catigories.
I am currently migrating to Linux due to the win 10 eol. Its taking a while as I will have to run a dual boot solution as I do so. My current backup system is periodic copies to external hard drives, cycling the drives around so if one dies I don’t loose too much.
I had a hard drive die recently, and when I went to restore found that the most recent backup drive had also died. I mean what’s the chance of that happening? Ok 100% as it just did but still… Since that was the only drive that had a set of files I needed I ended up using a data recovery service. Not a cheap or easy option.
So basically my back up regeme is flawed.
I guess one solution would be to back up twice, once on the cycle drive and once on a drive that just mimics the last cycle drive. But are there better alternatives?
A lot of the files are videos and photos (holiday/family etc) that don’t change with the rest being the usual letters emails and occational game save.
Since most of the files don’t change I suspect a nas would be overkill. but what about some kind of tape? LTO drives seem relatively cheap on ebay and the tapes far cheaper than yet another hard drive.
I don’t think LTO works at all with desktop windows, but am not sure about desktop linux. Reading around on various forums suggests its a solution, but that the software may be tricky. Many appear to use tar scripts. I know I would need a sas card. Some early (and cheap) LTO drives look like they are scsi but I have no idea which varient and playing guess the scsi width is a game I’d rather pass on.
So, please, how do folks here back up, do you use tape, if so how, hard drives like me, or something else?
/home/$user$ backup is for your personal stuff - external HDD is even enough once a week or so for me I do run this on a USB C HDD with dejadup on GNOME
timeshift is THE lifesaver for my system. I did setup timeshift in the way that it runs automatically for every update on any package that I do via pacman.
Another possibility would be to use the BTRFS filesystem (but I am not familiar with this at all). Anyhow: read about timeshift …
For OS, clone image. Foxclone or Clonezilla. Clonezilla if I want it transferred to NAS. Then I also manually copy it to external USB drive. I always have 2 backups. And I have tested the clone a few times so the backups work.
For small files, Syncthing. To my NAS and to laptop. 2 places again. One drive might fail but 2 computers at the same time? Highly inlikely. Plus I keep those files on 3 different drives on my PC. So really 5 places.
I looked at LTO. The drive is like couple hundred dollars I think. And tapes are not cheap either. Plus, it will probably be slow. If you want the fast stuff, possibly costs you 10 000 dollars. To get started. Another downside with tapes are, they have to read the tape from start to finish to restore anything. It can take hours or days.
For small files, I occasionally still burn to DVD. Like photos. k3b works for me, to burn. I tried 3 different programs. The other 2 didn’t pan out. DVD-burning is so old, I can’t remember how it is done. And software usually haven’t been updated in like a decade. I used to use Nero Burning ROM, on Windows, 20 years ago. That app died a decade ago.
I don’t know about Bluray since there is like 3 companies that still make the discs. And it costs more than DVD. But if you have the money and need something bigger than 8 gigs, it is an option. An external DVD-burner + 25 doublesided DVDs totals like 70 dollars. Can fit 200 gigs of files. Plenty enough for me.
The NAS? A 15 year old PC with 2 new disks. 6 gigs of RAM. 8 would be better. 4-core Phenom. It’s enough, it can handle the load. ZFS. Running Truenas Scale. Easy appliance to work with. Plenty of videos online too, I think Lawrence Systems has a few too. What is his name, Tom Lawrence? For permissions, ACLs etc. I only turn the NAS on when I copy something to it, which is like 1 hour a week.
I’m going to echo linux-aarhus approach. Especially if you don’t mess around with your system much. Losing personal files, photos, etc is the real loss. Systems can be reinstalled and if you keep it simple won’t take that much time.
What I’ve been doing is having a working OS on drives used for backup. (Something you can’t really do with Windows!)
This means I’ll always have a bootable system without having to use a Live session to copy stuff from the /home and /DATA partitions to a replacement disk, etc. .
Hi Many thanks for all the replies. I have some reading to do!
A couple of questions since I am fairly new to Linux.
@Mirdarthos (and anyone else) what are *.d drop in directories?
@BG405 I have my system set up with /efi, /root, /usr, and /home. What lives in the /data partition and more to the point where would it be in my config? I can see lots of data sub directories, but no top level one.
Like @doctorx, I have a lot of data in the form of family videos, around 50 tb, which is why I was considering LTO. Speed is not really a consideration. I just need something that isn’t going to die on me unexpectedly.
I also have a slow internet and while I don’t play many games, one of the ones I do is huge (data wise) so reinstalling that would be very painful.
