How often do you run backups on your system?

I run Borg nightly, backing up the majority of the data on my boot disk, incl docker volumes and config + a few extra folders.

Each individual archive is around 550gb, but because of the de-duplication and compression it's only ~800mb of new data each day taking around 3min to complete the backup.

Borgs de-duplication is honestly incredible. I keep 7 daily backups, 3 weekly, 11 monthly, then one for each year beyond that. The 21 historical backups I have right now RAW would be 10.98tb of data. After de-duplication and compression it only takes up 407.98gb on disk.

With that kind of space savings, I see no reason not to keep such frequent backups. Hell, the whole archive takes up less space than one copy of the original data.

Once every 24 hours.

Backups???

Daily backups here. Storage is cheap. Losing data is not.

I do not as I cannot afford the extra storage required to do so.

Proxmox servers are mirrored zpools, not that RAID is a backup. Replication between Proxmox servers every 15 minutes for HA guests, hourly for less critical guests. Full backups with PBS at 5AM and 7PM, 2 sets apiece with one set that goes off site and is rotated weekly. Differential replication every day to zfs.rent. I keep 30 dailies, 12 weeklys, 24 monthly and infinite annuals.

Periodic test restores of all backups at various granularities at least monthly or whenever I'm bored or fuck something up.

Yes, former sysadmin.

I use Duplicati for my backups, and have backup retention set up like this:

Save one backup each day for the past week, then save one each week for the past month, then save one each month for the past year.

That way I have granual backups for anything recent, and the further back in the past you go the less frequent the backups are to save space

Every hour, automatically

Never on my Laptop, because I'm too lazy to create a mechanism that detects when it's possible.

Nextcloud data daily, same for the docker configs. Less important/rarely changing data once per week. Automatic sync to NAS and online storage. Irregular and manual sync to an external disk.

7 daily backups, 4 weekly backups, "infinite" monthly backups retained (until I clean them up by hand).

Boils down to how much are you willing to lose? Personally I do weekly

Weekly full backup, nightly incremental

Local zfs snap every 5 mins.

Borg backups everything hour to 3 different locations.

I've blown away docker folders of config files a few times by accident. So far I've only had to dip into the zfs snaps to bring them back.

If you haven't tested your backups, you ain't got a backup.

Right now, I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent?

Only you can answer this. How many days of data are you prepared to lose? What are the downsides of running your backup scripts more frequently?

rsync from ZFS to an off-site unraid every 24 hours 5 times a week. on the sixth day it does a checksum based rsync which obviously means more stress so only do it once a week. the seventh day is reserved for ZFS scrubbing every two weeks.

Backup all of my proxmox-LXCs/VMs to a proxmox backup server every night + sync these backups to another pbs in another town. A second proxmox backup every noon to my nas. (i know, 3-2-1 rule is not reached...)

Most backup software allow you to configure backup retention. I think I went with some pretty standard once per day for a week. After that they get deleted, and it keeps just one per week of the older ones, for one or two months. And after that it's down to monthly snapshots. I think that aligns well with what I need. Sometimes I find out something broke the day before yesterday. But I don't think I ever needed a backup from exactly the 12th of December or something like that. So I'm fine if they get more sparse after some time. And I don't need full backups more than necessary. An incremental backup will do unless there's some technical reason to do full ones.

But it entirely depends on the use-case. Maybe for a server or stuff you work on, you don't want to lose more than a day. While it can be perfectly alright to back up a laptop once a week. Especially if you save your documents in the cloud anyway. Or you're busy during the week and just mess with your server configuration on weekends. In that case you might be alright with taking a snapshot on fridays. Idk.

(And there are incremental backups, full backups, filesystem snapshots. On a desktop you could just use something like time machine... You can do different filesystems at different intervals...)

I have

• Unraid back up it's USB
• Unraid appears gets backed up weekly by a community applications (CA app backup) and I use rclone to back it up to an old box account (100GB for life..) I did have it encrypted but seems I need to fix that..
• Parity drive on my Unraid (8TB)
• I am trying to understand how to use Rclone to back up my photos to Proton Drive so that's next.

Music and media is not too important yet but I would love some insight

I classify the data according to its importance (gold, silver, bronze, ephemeral). The regularity of the zfs snapshots (15 minutes to several hours) and their retention time (days to years) on the server depends on this. I then send the more important data that I cannot restore or can only restore with great effort (gold and silver) to another server once a day. For bronze, the zfs snapshots and a few days of storage time on the server are enough for me, as it is usually data that I can restore (build artifacts or similar) or is simply not that important. Ephemeral is for unimportant data such as caches or pipelines.

I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent?

Only you can answer that - what is your risk tolerance for data loss?

Timeshift creates a btrfs snapshot on each boot for me. And my server gets nightly borg backups.

No backup for my media. Only redundacy.

For my nextcloud data, anytime i made major changes.

Depends on the application. I run a nightly backup of a few VM's because realistically they dont change much. I have containers on the other hand that run critical (to me) systems like my photo backup and they are backed up twice a day.

Every hour. Could do it more frequently if needed.

It depends on how resource intensive the backup process is.

Consider an 800GB Immich instance.

Using Duplicity or rsync takes 1 hour per backup. 99% of the time is spent in traversing the directory structure and checking which files have changed. 1% is spent into transferring the difference to the backup. Any backup system that operates on top of the file system would take this much. In addition, unless you're using something that can take snapshots of the filesystem, you have to stop Immich during the backup process in order to prevent backing up an invalid app state.

Using ZFS send on the other hand (with syncoid) takes less than 5 seconds to discover the differences and the rest of the time is spent on the data transfer, at 100MB/s in my case. Since ZFS send is based on snapshots, I don't have to stop the service either.

When I used Duplicity to backup, I would backup once week because the backup process was long and heavy on the disk array. Since I switched to ZFS send, I do it once an hour because there's almost no visible impact.

I'm now in the process of migrating my laptop to ZFS on root in order to be able to utilize ZFS send for regular full system backups. If successful, eventually I'll move all my machines to ZFS on root.

I continuous backup important files/configurations to my NAS. That's about it.

IMO people who redundant/backup their media are insane... It's such an incredible waste of space. Having a robust media library is nice, but there's no reason you can't just start over if you have data corruption or something. I have TB and TB of media that I can redownload in a weekend if something happens (if I even want). No reason to waste backup space, IMO.

Thanks for reminding me to validate.

Daily here also.

I honestly don't have too much to back up, so I run one full backup job every Sunday for different directories I care about. They run a check on the directory and only back up any changes or new files. I don't have the space to backup everything, so I only take the smaller stuff and most important. The backup software also allows live monitoring if I enable it, so some of my jobs I have that turned on since I didn't see any reason not to. I reuse the NAS drives that report errors that I replace with new ones to save on money. So far, so good.

Backup software is Bvckup2, and reddit was a huge fan of it years ago, so I gave it a try. It was super cheap for a lifetime license at the time, and it's super lightweight. Sorry, there is no Linux version.

Longest interval is every 24 hours. With some more frequent like every 6 hours or so, like the ones for my game servers.

I have multiple backups (3-2-1 rule), 1 is just important stuff as a file backup, the other is a full bootable system image of everything.

With proper backup software incremental backups don't use any more space unless files are changed, so no real downside to more frequent backups.

Daily toward all my three locations:

• local on the server
• in-house but on a different device
• offsite

But not all three destinations backup the same amount of data due to storage limitations.

Using Kopia, backups are made multiple times per day to Google drive. Only changes are transferred.

Configurations are backed up once per week and manually, stored 4 weeks. Websites and NextCloud data is backed up every hour and stored for a year (although I'm doing this only 7 months now).

Kopia is magic, recommended!

Depends on the system but weekly at least

I tried Kopia but it was unstable and janky, so now it's whenever I remember to manually run a bunch of rsync. I backup my desktop to cold storage on the first of the month, so I should get in the habit of backing up my server to the NAS then also.

And equally important, how do you do your backups? What system and to where?

I'm always backing up with SyncThing in realtime, but every week I do an off-site type of tarball backup that isn't within the SyncThing setup.

Daily backups. Currently using restic on my NixOS servers. To avoid data corruption, I make a zfs snapshot at 2am, and after that restic does a backup of my mutable data dirs both to my local Nas and CloudFlare r3. The Nas backup folder is synced to backblaze nightly as well for a more cold store.

Assuming it is on: Daily

@Sunny Backups are done weekly, using Restic (and with '--read-data-subset=9%' to verify that the backup data is still valid).

But that's also in addition to doing nightly Snapraid syncs for larger media, and Syncthing for photos & documents (which means I have copies on 2+ machines).