How I Backup my Computers - Chris Titus Tech
video description
Rsync over ssh my desktop /home dir to nas (it's in another location -30 miles away) mon, wed and friday at 3am scheduled wol and crojob then power off itself
Sync documents folder with synology drive across my other devices laptop and garage pc
backup documents folder (encrypted) from nas to google drive every day 2am
Snapshots on important shares on my nas and manual backups to usb hdd.
Cloneziila to shh (my nas it's away from me)for bare metal, usually monthly but in reality ones few months :)
Date: 2022-03-21
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Comments and reviews: 9
Rick
no Linux client, but that aside, the most balanced solution to ease/automation vs security I-ve found is Arq for my Mac. I had Mozy, but they started charging way more. Had Backblaze but their customer service turns out to be garbage when there-s an actual issue. Blamed my browser cookies for a NaN JS problem in their website, and basically shrugged when my entire backup got corrupted/trashed on their side when I was migrating to a new computer.
Arq offers S3-like cloud storage now, but is otherwise entirely client-side driven. You buy the app one time like traditional software, then mix, match and choose what you want from among a boatload of storage options - local, any S3 compatible, GCP, Dropbox etc. I use local (-4 hrs) and a cloud provider (daily). Do local, AWS, Google _and_ OneDrive if you like. You pay storage provider, Arq has no involvement. Everything is encrypted locally before leaving, and the cloud provider has no relation to or awareness of Arq. It-s just encrypted data to them. Scheduling is your choice, can set cost budgets, storage tiers if available. I have a few UI/UX gripes where things are more difficult than necessary but overall I dig the independence and freedom to do it how I want without needing to trust Backblaze et al not to snoop and not to fail their one job.
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no Linux client, but that aside, the most balanced solution to ease/automation vs security I-ve found is Arq for my Mac. I had Mozy, but they started charging way more. Had Backblaze but their customer service turns out to be garbage when there-s an actual issue. Blamed my browser cookies for a NaN JS problem in their website, and basically shrugged when my entire backup got corrupted/trashed on their side when I was migrating to a new computer.
Arq offers S3-like cloud storage now, but is otherwise entirely client-side driven. You buy the app one time like traditional software, then mix, match and choose what you want from among a boatload of storage options - local, any S3 compatible, GCP, Dropbox etc. I use local (-4 hrs) and a cloud provider (daily). Do local, AWS, Google _and_ OneDrive if you like. You pay storage provider, Arq has no involvement. Everything is encrypted locally before leaving, and the cloud provider has no relation to or awareness of Arq. It-s just encrypted data to them. Scheduling is your choice, can set cost budgets, storage tiers if available. I have a few UI/UX gripes where things are more difficult than necessary but overall I dig the independence and freedom to do it how I want without needing to trust Backblaze et al not to snoop and not to fail their one job.
reply
Entelin
raid 5 is not considered safe for large (>1tb) disks, especially when combined with identical disks. Over the year's, back when raid 5 was more popular I actually did have a few clients that lost a second disk in the rebuild. You want a set of striped mirrors ideally, or otherwise double or triple parity if performance doesn't matter. On linux with zfs backups are basically a totally integrated and solved issue, you can use zfs send to another device complete with snapshots, datasets can be encrypted and compressed, and the receiving system doesn't need the encryption key to manage snapshots, so the normal process of consolidation of incremental is simple and fast. I imagine you can do the same with btrfs, which is what synology uses, but I don't have much knowledge on that yet. On windows, or any workstation for that matter, ideally you just wouldn't have any data you care about directly on them and connect over the network. If for no reason other than whatever hardware you have on that for storage is probably quite inferior in terms of safety, and potentially speed as well.
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raid 5 is not considered safe for large (>1tb) disks, especially when combined with identical disks. Over the year's, back when raid 5 was more popular I actually did have a few clients that lost a second disk in the rebuild. You want a set of striped mirrors ideally, or otherwise double or triple parity if performance doesn't matter. On linux with zfs backups are basically a totally integrated and solved issue, you can use zfs send to another device complete with snapshots, datasets can be encrypted and compressed, and the receiving system doesn't need the encryption key to manage snapshots, so the normal process of consolidation of incremental is simple and fast. I imagine you can do the same with btrfs, which is what synology uses, but I don't have much knowledge on that yet. On windows, or any workstation for that matter, ideally you just wouldn't have any data you care about directly on them and connect over the network. If for no reason other than whatever hardware you have on that for storage is probably quite inferior in terms of safety, and potentially speed as well.
reply
turbo1gts
Would have given a thumbs up just on -voluminous.- :) Clonezilla is invaluable for backing up installed operating systems, cloning hard drives to newer, bigger ones. I have used it with USB 3.0 hard drive enclosures, and over my home network to my file server, usually via SSH. Back in my DOS/Windows9.x days, and even OS/2, I used ARJ with its chapter function. First chapter is fresh, working install, second chapter is that plus basic freeware apps and config changes, then add chapters to catch changes thereafter. Back then, floppies were sufficient for DOS and games, and CDs for Windows95/ME plus games. Now, I keep copies of personal pictures, ripped CDs and cassettes, and GOG install files and a few other things on a couple of 4TB drives in USB 3.0/ESATA enclosures. Every once in a while, I mirror my Steam library to one of them, but that can all be downloaded, it would just take a long time for the longer ones.
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Would have given a thumbs up just on -voluminous.- :) Clonezilla is invaluable for backing up installed operating systems, cloning hard drives to newer, bigger ones. I have used it with USB 3.0 hard drive enclosures, and over my home network to my file server, usually via SSH. Back in my DOS/Windows9.x days, and even OS/2, I used ARJ with its chapter function. First chapter is fresh, working install, second chapter is that plus basic freeware apps and config changes, then add chapters to catch changes thereafter. Back then, floppies were sufficient for DOS and games, and CDs for Windows95/ME plus games. Now, I keep copies of personal pictures, ripped CDs and cassettes, and GOG install files and a few other things on a couple of 4TB drives in USB 3.0/ESATA enclosures. Every once in a while, I mirror my Steam library to one of them, but that can all be downloaded, it would just take a long time for the longer ones.
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Computer
I back up to a Linux computer that isn't used for anything else other than FTP for security camera capture. It can be accessed from any computer on the network through Samba with password protection. I've used it to restore my files from one crash so far, where the video software for a GPU crashed the OS.
What may have saved me from using the backups on the other Linux computer is to use a separate drive in the computer that crashed for the data, since most of the time it is the OS that crashes. This can be done with both Linux and Windoze, but with Windoze you lose some security, which you don't have much of anyway. With Linux the other drive can be password protected.
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I back up to a Linux computer that isn't used for anything else other than FTP for security camera capture. It can be accessed from any computer on the network through Samba with password protection. I've used it to restore my files from one crash so far, where the video software for a GPU crashed the OS.
What may have saved me from using the backups on the other Linux computer is to use a separate drive in the computer that crashed for the data, since most of the time it is the OS that crashes. This can be done with both Linux and Windoze, but with Windoze you lose some security, which you don't have much of anyway. With Linux the other drive can be password protected.
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Whitey
Hey Chris, This year I also ventured into the 1621+ realm. Active backup PCs, Hyper-V environments, Drive sync files on all virtuals. Drive sync means I can work local and access the same files from other virtual machines - glorious! Hyper backup NAS to large USB drive, take that off-site for period of time. Then hyper backup to backup the local weekly backups and shares to Azure Blob storage. Such a great solution that just works. Don-t forget about all the log notifications that tells you what-s going on. I-ll never look back, such an awesome complete solution.
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Hey Chris, This year I also ventured into the 1621+ realm. Active backup PCs, Hyper-V environments, Drive sync files on all virtuals. Drive sync means I can work local and access the same files from other virtual machines - glorious! Hyper backup NAS to large USB drive, take that off-site for period of time. Then hyper backup to backup the local weekly backups and shares to Azure Blob storage. Such a great solution that just works. Don-t forget about all the log notifications that tells you what-s going on. I-ll never look back, such an awesome complete solution.
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Johann
I back up all my school stuff and documents onto my own physical Nextcloud server. That server is also running timeshift on btrfs for snapshots, and I'm thinking of backing up the files on its main drive to other drives on that box. The way I tested this was when my laptop died and I didn't have any computer on me that worked with nvme SSDs. All my other computers are also running timeshift btrfs snapshots and have my entire nextcloud synced to them, so if the server goes down I'll have nextcloud backups on all my PCs.
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I back up all my school stuff and documents onto my own physical Nextcloud server. That server is also running timeshift on btrfs for snapshots, and I'm thinking of backing up the files on its main drive to other drives on that box. The way I tested this was when my laptop died and I didn't have any computer on me that worked with nvme SSDs. All my other computers are also running timeshift btrfs snapshots and have my entire nextcloud synced to them, so if the server goes down I'll have nextcloud backups on all my PCs.
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gmc9753
I have a couple external USB drives that I use for backups. I use rsnapshot to do the actual backing up with a couple little shell scripts to manage it. I only backup the actual data plus configuration files for services. I have it set up to keep 50 generations of backups so I can retrieve files from quite a while ago. I run the backup script by hand every couple weeks since it takes less than 5 minutes to run on about 300G of data. Rsnapshot only physically copies files that have been modified since the last backup.
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I have a couple external USB drives that I use for backups. I use rsnapshot to do the actual backing up with a couple little shell scripts to manage it. I only backup the actual data plus configuration files for services. I have it set up to keep 50 generations of backups so I can retrieve files from quite a while ago. I run the backup script by hand every couple weeks since it takes less than 5 minutes to run on about 300G of data. Rsnapshot only physically copies files that have been modified since the last backup.
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Aene
Hi Chris, what do you think about my backup? Im using an old hp workstation (pentium 4) with openmediavault and 4 - 2tb drive's in raid 10 (software raid) and i backup there about 1tb of mainly documents - with a software that is on a virtual server just for the backups - and some vmware drives. I have added 2 - 1gb lan cards and it works pretty fast for such an old cpu. I know its not great but it gets the job done in the end and i keep a backup on usb drive too.
reply
Hi Chris, what do you think about my backup? Im using an old hp workstation (pentium 4) with openmediavault and 4 - 2tb drive's in raid 10 (software raid) and i backup there about 1tb of mainly documents - with a software that is on a virtual server just for the backups - and some vmware drives. I have added 2 - 1gb lan cards and it works pretty fast for such an old cpu. I know its not great but it gets the job done in the end and i keep a backup on usb drive too.
reply
Seamus
Hi Chris, your videos always really in dep[th and well done. But I must admit, some stuff is just over my head. I currently have an unraid server setup, and I want to backup two specific drives from my desktop to that unraid server. I watched your rsync video, but I didn't follow along very well. Is there any dumby proof solution you would recommend?
Also, I want some automation that would reflect changes made to those drives in the desktop.
reply
Hi Chris, your videos always really in dep[th and well done. But I must admit, some stuff is just over my head. I currently have an unraid server setup, and I want to backup two specific drives from my desktop to that unraid server. I watched your rsync video, but I didn't follow along very well. Is there any dumby proof solution you would recommend?
Also, I want some automation that would reflect changes made to those drives in the desktop.
reply
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