"Also make sure not to run backups at 2AM or 3AM, or things may get scary."

I never though of daylight savings times causing such an issue. Learned something today.

On my home PC I use restic, and (shockingly) I run it manually (via a script). I have a terminal banner that nags me when backup hasn't run in 24 hours, or displays spanish verb tables when it has (so I will notice if the banner doesn't show). I've been burned in the past losing a backup cron, and dead man's snitch seemed overkill for my needs here. And I've also forgotten what backup system was in place on a prior install, and it took me way longer than I liked figuring out how it was setup when I needed to do a restore.

Obviously for production systems automation & monitoring is the way. I kind of like this setup on my own machine though.

I've given out jwz's link to several people:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

(maybe copy/paste this into browser instead of following link, since referrer from hn apparently does something)

3 rules of backup (don't remember where i read this)

- do several backups (not using the same hardware brand or host if you do it online)

- check your backup (if something was wrong, you have another backup from the first rule)

- do not store your backups at the same place (if your place get flooded or burn, it will be pretty handy)

For my small library photos, keepass passwords, etc around 30gb, I use syncthing, which will backup on my pc, on my parents pc (they live in another country), on my sisters pc and on my phone. They also use this triangular mode to backup their stuff. Syncthing is setup to only sync through tailscale or home routers network.

Something is better than nothing. I accidentally spilled liquid on my macbook just the other day. It's still in the shop. Luckily, I periodically clone my drive with CCC onto a single external SSD. Don't wait to set up the perfect backup solution, just have a copy of your data in more than one place, that's a good start imho.

Huge fan of borg + vorta for backups and time Maschine like „Jump back in time“. Wrote about it years ago: https://simon-frey.com/blog/borgvorta-is-finally-a-usable-ba...

One of our customers decided to go for off site backups with us - they had been a customer for 15 odd years for other services. Backups are not our core business, its one of the services and I got around to setting them up sooner rather than later.

Two weeks later they had a fire in one of their huge printing machines which caused quite a lot of direct damage due to heat and rendered a lot of equipment broken due to smoke/fumes. It was also, as it turns out, a week before the first COVID 19 lockdown in the UK.

Their backups landed on a XFS file system with reflinks enabled. I cloned their repo and fired up NFS with their VMs running on our gear. It took me another hour to spin up another OpenVPN server (CA etc) for them to use and sort out a few other details (coffee doesn't brew itself).

They ran via VPN out of our data centre for most of the pandemic.

That was an utter triumph but I also have some rather less triumphant stories about backups and lack thereof. Let's skip over those 8)

For my Oracle Linux systems, I rely on the vendor ReaR RPM package for the baseline backup. This is similar to the "Ignite" utility that I used in my HP-UX days.

https://relax-and-recover.org/

This is two-fold useful, first as it enables boot from backup media for total recovery, second in that it creates a backup.tar.gz that holds everything that was not explitictly ignored in the /etc/rear/local.conf file.

I'm running Oracle databases on these systems (and the local.conf is configured to ignore the datafile directories). I have standby databases (not Dataguard in that I don't have online redolog replication) that allow me to recover them to the primary in a disaster, with some loss of committed transactions.

I finally have rsync configured for some scratch temporary files.

I have dallied with btrfs snapshot replication for home directories (in a loopback mount). My vendor support (via a CSI number) has been on and off, so I don't use btrfs in areas that we need it most.

My replacements do not like the complexity (and I am retiring).

My setup: rsync to Synology NAS, snapshotting there, sync to remote Synology NAS over VPN. (The other NAS is at my parent's and they have similar setup syncing to me)

The best part: it is just files, not some proprietary archive. I have high confidence in this. I can restore with the most rudimentary tools.

This setup has worked for me well on linux, windows and now mac. I migrated to new computer&os by restoring the backup mostly.