Does anyone have any recommendations for good backup software? My use case is pretty simple. I have an external usb drive I want to backup to every so often. Both the source and backup drives are 8TB capacity (I’m not even close to using the full capacity yet)
Normally the backup drive is left unplugged but I want to be able to plug it in run the backup software to copy across anything new then unplug it again for storage.
Simple file backup (not looking to do a full bootable OS drive backup or anything)
Thank you
You must log in or # to comment.
I use restic.
Restic is bestic.
Borg has worked well for me. Also supports compression, encryption and deduplication.
Borg is basically the gold standard.
This will work perfectly for OP
And the documentation is great!
Restic is my go-to.
FreeFileSync is FOSS and works pretty well for me. It can be set up for automated sync on a schedule or you can just manually sync files between two destinations. I haven’t really tinkered with the automated stuff but if what you want is to open up a program and hit a button to sync, it can definitely do that.
Hey, I’d recommend taking a look at Syncthing. It’s software that runs locally, and you can configure the synchronisation to occur in a unidirectional flow instead of bidirectional. I.e. configure it to only synchronise data from the source drive to the backup drive.
Hope this helps and all the best!
EDIT: As pointed out, Syncthing is more suited to syncing data between two or more devices so may not be the right solution for OPs use case.
But, syncthing does not allow single-device synchronization, is a multi-device sync app
Hey… Ah, you are correct. Thanks, I’ll update my original comment.
I’m using good old rsync in a command line
The question really is what data you‘re trying to back up.
Would you be annoyed, sad, very sad or potentially ruined if that data goes away?
Depending on your threat level, you should choose one that strikes the balance between cost and reliability.
If you don’t have tons of data and it’s not insanely important data, use something free to encrypt/stripe it over free google/dropbox/onedrive accounts.
If it is insanely important data, you can try tarsnap. I just heard of it but stripe uses it for their credit card data.
I personally use idrive. Has worked well so far but is paid as well and I didnt have to restore yet.
Good luck.
Just to answer your question:
It’s quite a lot of data but not insanely important, it would be really inconvenient if I lost it but far from the end of the world. I’m looking at local backup because in the event of an entire hardware drive failure having to download all the data again over the internet would take an absolute age. Not that a cloud backup isn’t also good (I am using backblaze) in case the local backup drive also failed at the same time.
I do however have other things that are really important which I already backup with multiple levels of cloud and local storage (such as family photos, secure documents etc) - I will check out tarsnap as well though as it sounds interesting Thank you
Thanks for clarifying! It sounds like you are fairly experienced already. I‘m pretty certain you will figure out the right solution for yourself.
To expand a little on my setup and backup philosopy: basically 3-2-1 backup strategy, 3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 off site
- I run my bulk storage on two wd red 8 tb in raid 1 (2 copies)
- I backup the documents, personal photos and videos on an encrypted iDrive storage (3rd copy, 2 types of media, 1 off site)
- I also have my dvds ripped on my drives but they are „backed up“ physically in the basement
The only thing I still need go take care of is backing up my system itself which is still elusive to me.
In case you need cheap bulk backup storage. I chose iDrive because it is very cheap per TB compared to other cloud storage providers and you can encrypt everything (you could also encrypt locally and copy it somewhere but thats out of my scope rn)
Have a good one! :)
I recently set up rsnapshot. You set the backup cadence as a cron job. And then every time it runs, it hard links all the files that haven’t changed, then rsyncs all the files that have changed. So you could go back to three days ago if you set it up that way. Or last month. Or whatever works for your use case.
The catch is that it has to pull the files rather than push, so if you have a Synology or something with a smaller OS, it may not support rsnapshot. For my Synology, I had to create a docker container for it to work, since there was no way to install it directly on the host OS.
Bvckup (not a typo)
Made by a little Swiss company, extremely light but very competent. Stays completely out of your way unless it absolutely must get your attention (which is usually never).
I think it’s paid only but it’s very reasonable. Works great in intermittent situations, I. E. It won’t blow up if it tries to run a scheduled backup and the source or target is disconnected etc… Works very well for me for a decade.
rclone with backblaze b2.Goodl luck finding a cheaper solution that’s actually durable.
Kopia
I am very happy using duply, that uses duplicity. Works well both for mounted disks or S3.
I would ignore any recommendations of a sync tool like Dropbox. They will very happy propagate your problem in all your places before you realized it.
I have a similar setup (external USB drive that I periodically plugin to backup stuff), and I use rsnapshot which is based on the venerable
rsyncutility. It is a command line solution that I’ve used for many years and it allows you to do daily, weekly, or even monthly backups.I also use rsnapshot for handling remote backups as well, so it is pretty versatile.
Am I the only one out here using Clonezilla? Am I that out of touch?
No it’s the children who are wrong.
Don’t you have to reboot into it to use it and set up the backup manually every time? That seems like a pain to do daily/weekly.
Yeah you do have to do that. I don’t backup as regularly as I should. But I use it to make full disk images (including the partition table). Do the other popular ones allow this?
Veeam does for sure on a live system, I’ve also used macrium before. But I don’t know if any FOSS projects are that advanced.
Adding to what has already been said by other commenters, if the data is really important you should consider an off-site backup in addition to your external hard drive backup. It could be Dropbox, Google Drive, Backblaze, a hard drive in another place, as long as you can recover your data in case your home gets robbed or destroyed (flood, fire).
For these particular files I do also use Backblaze, that’s definitely useful if a subset of files were lost but having to download an entire 8TB hdd worth of data would be pretty painful with Backblaze (their physical hdd shipping isn’t really a good option as I’m not US based).
In this case as the external drives were on offer I bought two of them with the intention of the second drive to be the backup. The files here aren’t really really important, but would be very annoying if I lost it all.
For my truly critical files (things like family photos, secure documents etc) I have other multiple levels of backup, both with synced cloud services and local backups just to be safe. Backups upon Backups upon Backups there! (3 - 2 - 1 and then some)
