Lots of people have mentioned rsynx, restic, borgbackup, and others, but which would be best for backing up nextcloud, immich, and radicale? Do all of them have a method of automatically backing up every X days/weeks? Why use one over the other, what are the differences?
Not sure about other options but Backrest has worked wonderfully for me since day 1. Basically just a GUI for Restic. My only complaints are that jobs can’t be assigned to multiple repos and you can’t edit a job’s name or repo once created. Aside from those quirks, it works fine - I have daily, weekly, monthly, and manual jobs set up across both servers and my desktop, basically just set it and forget it.
It’s a GUI and a bit more than that. Restic’s biggest pain point is that periodic runs have to be set up manually. Backrest does that for you.
Although I’m using resticprofile, just because it also works(and has a nice web hook support) but I also use backrest and I highly recommend it.
Highly highly recommend Backrest!
restic is great but I’m not the best at scripts and JSON and crontab and whatever
Backrest puts the amazing restic right up front with a gui. Add in healthchecks.io webhooks (literally copy and paste setup) and it’s my go-to backup solution hands-down
I use borg with borgmatic. Heck, if you’re using Nextcloud AIO, borg is built in. It uses rsync, and takes incremental, deduplicated backups. I like it because it’s mostly just setting up ssh and a config file.
More specifically I use Nextcloud’s built in borg and these two containers:
Edit: I forgot that for my personal devices I use PikaBackup, which also uses Borg.
Vorta is an awesome front end to Borg for machines with a gui.
This along with borg warehouse is the GOAT setup. Many others exist of course.
Borgbase for offsite backup as well. Has been rock solid and I test download files from there every now and again with no issues. Never really did a full restore since its my 3rd line backup
Haven’t used all of those but my recommendation would be to just start trying them. Start small, get a feel for it and expand usage or try a different backup solution. You should be able to do automatic backups for any of them either directly or setting up your own timer/cron jobs (which is how i do it with rsync).
And trying restore a lot, don’t be like me!
The question you’re asking is too broad. Every tool somehow differs from the others, but listing all differences requires in-depth knowledge of each tool and a lot of time.
At the end of the day, every tool somehow backs up your data. CLI interfaces, encryption algorithms, deduplication logic, supported backends, underlying programming languages and a lot more may differ. Identify what’s most important to you, test different solutions and then use the tool that works best for your use-case.
I am currently looking into borg because it can take incremental backups. I just need figure out how I should handle a running system, if I need to turn of all my docker images or if there is some kind of snapshot function I can use.
From what I read on their FAQ, Borg cannot verify the integrity so I would need to turn everything off during the backup process. A filesystem like ZFS could have solved that problem (cannot find the link, something about shadow copy I think?) but since I don’t have a backup yet nor physical access, I need to work with what I have.
I think I will set it to take a backup every night.
EDIT: Maybe it can verify integrity? Still trying to find information on my use case. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/check.html
I personally use rsync since I do most my work by command line these days. It’s taken nearly half a year really understand it but it offers the flexibility I desire.
I have a small network with only a handful of devices. I keep all my incremental backups on encrypted partitions and encrypted detachable SSD’s which I manually decrypt. Rsync is set up to use SSH so there’s some form of encrypted transfers but that’s not actually a priority for me, just an added benefit.
I also use rsync to sync files and directories while maintaining additional system attributes across multiple systems. That is to say, what’s root or user accessible stays root or user accessible after the transfer is complete.
If I desired more protection, I’d probably look into Borg backup. Currently I just use encryption as an annoyance deterrence method. I also stick to the base Rsync command because every other option I tried brought with it complexities which have all failed me. I at least have a high level confidence in my backup/restore process now.
I do monthly backups with cron and tar and syncthing for my containers.
I do quarterly backups of my server (14TB) to external USB HDDs. This is done via a script that mounts the drives, runs rsync to copy, then unmounts the drives again and emails me when it is done. I dont bother encrypting them as it ia mainly just media.
