this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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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

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.