this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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How should I do backups? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I have a server running Debian with 24 TB of storage. I would ideally like to back up all of it, though much of it is torrents, so only the ones with low seeders really need backed up. I know about the 321 rule but it sounds like it would be expensive. What do you do for backups? Also if anyone uses tape drives for backups I am kinda curious about that potentially for offsite backups in a safe deposit box or something.

TLDR: title.

Edit: You have mentioned borg and rsync, and while borg looks good, I want to go with rsync as it seems to be more actively maintained. I would like to also have my backups encrypted, but rsync doesn't seem to have that built in. Does anyone know what to do for encrypted backups?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The software borgbackup does some insane compression.

It is more effective if you backup multiple machines tbh (my 3 linux computers with ~600gb used each get compressed down to a single ~350gb backup, because most of the files are the same programs and data over and over again)

But it might do a decent enough job in your case.

So one of the solutions might be getting a NAS and setting up borgbackup.

You could also get a second one and put it in your parents or best friends home for an offsite backup.

That way you don't have to buy as large of a drive capacity, but will only have fixed costst (+electricity) instead of ongoing costs for some rented server storage.

I guess that would be about 400$ per such a device, if you get a used office pc and buy new drives for it.


Tape seems to be about half the price per TB, but then you need special reader/writer for it, which are usually connected via SAS and are FUCKING EXPENSIVE (over 4000$ as far as I can see).

It only outscales HDDs in price after like ~600TB

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

How do you handle the cache invalidation issue with Borg when backing up multiple systems to one repo? For me if I access a Borg repository from multiple computers (and write from each) it has to rebuild the cache each time which can take a long time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I seperate them by archive name prefix and never had the issue you describe.

Edit: it seems I just never noticed it, but the docu suggest you're right. Now I am confused myself lol.

https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#can-i-backup-from-multiple-servers-into-a-single-repository

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

big reason why i switched to kopia, borg just doesnt cut it anymore..

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Easy: I make a Borg repository not only for a single server but for each directory. In this way if I need a file from nextcloud with an extremely generic name like "config" I only search in there and not sift between 100k similarly named files