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

Cloud

VPS
S3
Backblaze

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