I am using duplicati and thinking of switching to Borg. What do you use and why?

  • Fryboyter@discuss.tchncs.de
    12·
    2 years ago

    There is no such thing as the objectively best solution. Each tool has advantages and disadvantages. And every user has different preferences and requirements.

    Personally, I am using Borg for years. And I have had to restore data several times, which has worked every time.

    In addition to Borg, you can also look at Borgmatic. This wrapper extends the functionality and makes some things easier.

    And if you want to use a graphical user interface, you can have a look at Vorta or Pika.

    • TedvdB@feddit.nl
      1·
      2 years ago

      Oh I love borg backups and the ability to script it.

      I’m making encrypted backups of a lot of servers this way, including a Lemmy instance.

  • mrmanager@lemmy.today
    7·
    2 years ago

    I don’t have backups. :/

    And I will regret it some day.

    I use github for code so that’s backed up though.

  • flux@beehaw.org
    6·
    2 years ago

    Kopia has served me great. I back up to my local Ceph S3 storage and then keep a second clone of that on a raid.

    Kopiahas good performance and miltiple hosts can back up tp it concurrently while preserving deduplication – unlike borgbackup.

    • 𝜏au@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      2 years ago

      I’ve been using Kopia on my desktop computer for a few years now to do cloud backups. It’s generally working well and I haven’t found anything else with the same combination of features yet.

      That said, kopia-ui is still a bit finicky and I’ve managed to bork a repo beyond repair a few times (e.g. once because my cloud provider account ran out of space, leading to some kind of inconsistent state) and there are some oddities, like the regular “periodic maintenance” (it’s a bit weird that it’s needed in the first place) randomly failing or taking forever.

    • aliens@infosec.pubEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Kopia has been working great for me as well. It’s simple, versatile and reliable. I previously used Duplicati but kept running into jobs failing for no reason, backup configurations missing randomly and simple restores taking hours. It was a hot mess and I’m happy I switched.

      • Parsnip8904@beehaw.orgEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        I want to love kopia but the command line syntax feels unnatural to me. I don’t know why either. For the whole month I test drove it, I had to look up every single time how to do something. Contrast this with restic which is less featureful in some ways but a few days in it felt like I was just using git.

        • aliens@infosec.pubEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          I never used the command line with Kopia besides starting it up in server mode and used the web based GUI to configure, it was pretty simple to get everything setup that way. You may want to give it another try using Kopia in that mode.

            • flux@beehaw.orgEnglish
              3·
              2 years ago

              You can use the web ui remotely.

              Personally I use it from command line, though, and my only complaint is that it’s too easy to start a backup you didn’t intend to… Buut if you’re careful about usong the kopia snapshot command then it’s fine.

              • Parsnip8904@beehaw.orgEnglish
                2·
                2 years ago

                Oh I thought the webui was only for server mode.

                I just quickly glanced through the manuals of both restic and kopia. I think my trouble with kopia is that its style feels kind of weird. I’m just not able to wrap my head around it well.

                kopia snapshot create /dir is shorter but more confusing than restic -r repo backup /dir

  • CjkOvPDwQW@lemmy.pt
    5·
    2 years ago

    Using borg backup, just because there are some nice frontends for the gnome ecosystem (when I am using gnome, I love to use gnome apps), and it has a nice cmd for scripting when using something else (using it on servers)

  • karce@wizanons.dev
    4·
    2 years ago

    I use btrfs snapshots and btrbk

    btrfs is a great filesystem and btrbk complements it easily. Switching between snapshots is also really easy if something goes wrong and you need to restore.

    Archwiki docs for btrfs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Incremental_backup_to_external_drive

    Of course you’d still want a remote location to backup to. You can use an encrypted volume with cloud storage. So google drive, etc all work.

  • TDCN@feddit.dk
    3·
    2 years ago

    Rsync is great but if you want snapshots and file history rsnapshot works pretty well. It’s based on rsync but for every sync it creates shortcuts for existing files and only copies changes and new files. It saves space and remains transparent for the user. FreeFileSync is also amazing

  • Eduardo@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    What problem are you trying to solve? Please think about that, and about your backup strategy, before you decide on any specific tools.

    For example, here are several scenarios that I guard against in my backup strategy:

    • Accidentally delete a file, I want to recover it quickly (snapshots);
    • Entire drive goes kablooie, I want my system to continue running without downtime (RAID)
    • User data drive goes kablooie, I want to recover (many many options)
    • Root drive goes kablooie, I want to recover (baremetal recovery tools)
    • House burns down or computer is damaged/stolen (offsite backups)
  • JohannesOliver@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    Multiple. Locally I have Timeshift doing btrfs snapshots every so often. This is mostly to roll back to a snapshot if something breaks. I’ve never had to use it (and probably should).

    I use Pika backup every once in a while for a local backup to an external drive. Mostly because it’s easy to restore quickly.

    I have duplicacy doing backups to a cloud provider. I used to use duplicati for this, and it was fine - although I didn’t like that it seems to be forever in beta. I like that duplicacy can do deduplication between backups of different machines which most other solutions I’ve seen cannot. I like its selection of cloud providers vs Borg/Vorta and some others.

  • ISOmorph@feddit.de
    2·
    2 years ago

    I use FreeFileSync. It’s the only GUI tool I found that let’s me sync folders while omitting file deletions. It lets you create batch files from the GUI that I execute with crontab multiple times per day.

  • LordChaos82@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    2 years ago

    For my Ubuntu desktop, I use the builtin backup tool to take backups on my NAS. For my homelab, I have everything running on Proxmox and my Proxmox backup server takes care of the homelab backups.

  • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
    2·
    2 years ago

    I just use a script on an systemd timer. Well two scripts on two timers really - one running daily, one weekly for different data. It’s just a bunch of rsync commands copying folders to an hdd in my system and I reroute the output into a simple log file, mainly to verify if it ran at all. I am a bit paranoid about that. I can also run it manually whenever I want. Oh and some of the data I also rsync again to a smb cloud drive from Hetzner. I do not keep multiple versions and I delete remote files that have been deleted locally. It’s just a 1:1 copy.
    Oh and I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed so I have auto configured btrfs snapshots. Though I have not needed them yet and could not even say how I can use those. I figure that out once I need them.

  • GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    I’ve tried alternatives but I’ve stuck with LuckyBackup even though there have not been any updates for a while:

    1. It’s rsync based - which is updated
    2. It has masses of GUI options including various include/exclude options, pre- and post-commands, etc.
    3. It’s simple - I can browse inside the backed files and see what is going on, or just restore back one or two files.
    4. It updates cron itself.
  • isosphere@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    I’m currently working on a disaster recovery plan using fsarchiver. I have very limited experience with it so far, but it had the features and social proof I was looking for.

    I have so far used it to create offline filesystem backups of two volumes, one was LUKS encrypted (has to be manually “opened” with cryptsetup).

    It can backup live filesystems which was important to me.

    It’s early days for my experience with this, but I’m sure others have used it and might chime in.

    • flatbield@beehaw.org
      2·
      2 years ago

      Just one warning. If doing live, think about state and test your restores. Just mention because things like databases and ecryptfs will not properly archive live. There are various ways around, but consider if you have concerns regarding getting really good complete backups taken at one point in time and on live systems.