Linux Backups
Paul Waring
March 20, 2021
Introduction
- Different backup strategies
- Interactive - please ask questions/make comments!
Why backup
- User error
- Disc failure
- File corruption
- Malicious actors (esp. on servers)
Backup principles
- Backup often (at least daily)
- Automate backups
- Automate reminders
- Test restores
- Quick/easy restore of individual files
- Multiple sites if possible
What to backup
- Opinions vary
- Minimum: Anything you can’t rebuild/download
- Local data
- Remote data: Google Drive, emails etc.
- Don’t forget databases, saved games etc.
- Full disk snapshots
What not to backup
- Huge executables (e.g. Steam library)
DRM
- As-is is a good starting point
- Some DRM can be stripped (e.g. Calibre + DeDRM)
Hardware
- USB drives (1TB: £50, 2TB: £70, 4TB: £90)
- Spread drives amongst manufacturers
- Buy drives over time - less risk of a bad batch
- USB 3.0 (both sides!) if possible
- Seagate + Western Digital have worked for me
Trade-offs
- De-duplication
- Incremental vs full
- Compression
- Encryption
Security
- Backup software sometimes has built-in encryption
- Encrypt the underlying block device too (e.g. LUKS)
- Keep the keys somewhere secure - don’t lose them!
Borg
- De-duplication and encryption
- Supports different backend targets
borg check can be very slow - run it every X days- Available as a package for most distros
restic
- Very fast (for my workload)
- Rapid development
- Available as a Snap, binary, easy to build from source
tar
- Full backups are trivial
- Every Linux, *BSD and macOS machine has tar
- Range of compression options
- Need wrapper scripts for most purposes
rclone
- rsync for cloud services
- Supports Google Drive, Dropbox, lots of others
- Can upload and download
Automation
- Regular backups
- Prompt to backup (e.g. for USB drives that need to be inserted)
remind command
My backups
- Wrapper scripts for tar, restic, and borg