A bit of a tangent, but the linked rsnapshot tool is about 7k lines of perl code. The COPYING file is 20 years old and it's still maintained, the last change was 6 months ago. I'm feeling really old.

[1]: https://github.com/rsnapshot/rsnapshot/blob/master/rsnapshot...

"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.

They are simple.

The issue is companies love to fire QA people who should be the ones testing these.

Microsoft says we don’t need no SDETs, our products can ship full of issues.

What are the hostages, I mean customers going to do about it?

I have no sympathy for any major corp who suffers data loss. Now individuals who lost grandmas wedding photos, that sucks.

But my recovery strategy for that is simple. After scanning I emailed it out to one cousin who emailed them out to a few more. Plus I have a cloud backup ( I have no idea where the the original files are).

Data is meant to be shared after all

I have a cron script that rsync my entire home directory every day with a remote server. Since rsync doesn't remove remote files, I re-create a backup from scratch the first day of each month and store a copy of the previous one.

Using old standardized open source tools means it survives system updates without having to fix anything for years. I got my laptop stolen/lost 3 times over the past 15 years, and I have always been able to restore everything the next day on a new laptop, in the time it takes to transfer the files over the network.

I haven't given much thought, I'm sure there is a realistic scenario where this strategy would fails but I haven't found it yet.

concerning backups, when it comes to disaster recovery you need a strategy for restoring as well, sometimes it's not only the data you would need but the systems as well

>Motivated by our success in developing this solution, we try to use it to backup the homelab with its 10 Docker containers. But later we find out from logs on the individual machines that backups are failing. The reason being that many Docker containers like to create root-owned files, and if you’re not careful you can create a cronjob running as the default user.

and a privesc also.

Ran duplicity - it's really a blunt hammer, lots of duplication, rotation, etc.

Then switched to Restic - so much better - highly recommend this.

As an average-techie person, the only piece of data that i truly practice 3-2-1 is photos and videos. 1 on my phone, 1 on my small server running Immich, and 1 is on Google Photo(sadly, the quality is loss, but i can live with that).

Most of other data i only have 2 backup, usually 1 at my local machine(code) and 1 online(github). Yeah it's not ideal, but another question to ask yourself, is it truly worth it. I trust the engineers at MS doing much better job at backing up their data than me.

On the topic of backups, 7zip recently changed its handling of the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ARCHIVE bit on unzipped files which caused an issue with some old software I was using. This is from the old DOS days with the BACKUP/RESTORE commands - the bit was set if any backup was made of the file. It's comically naive because it only assumes a single backup and this bit was forgotten to the sands of time until it was disturbed by some meddling kids!

+1 for restic.

ZFS snapshots + restic backups to backblaze for my homeserver. My secret sauce is a healtchecks.io instance that blows up my phone if ZFS scrubs throw any errors, when local snapshots fail, or when restic checks or backups fail.