As Hacker News is filled with people who are well versed it IT, I would like to ask readers to share their personal backup strategies for their preferred operating system and what tools they use. Also, for those willing to share, are you performing full system backups or just backing up your important files?
For personal files/media, I heard about the 3-2-1 method: 3 copies, 2 formats, 1 offsite. I'd likely want to add a complete self-contained toolchain to convert format with that offsite copy.
I'm not nearly as particular with my OS backups as I used to be. For instance Desktop personalization is minimal. I've used too many computers over the years to maintain much configuration beyond a small number of dot-files. Hobby code goes in Github/codeberg.org and some kind of cloud sync for my daily driver.
Another thing that ended up happening naturally is that I keep hard drives of old computers when I upgrade. They serve as point-in-time snapshots. I haven't made it a point to be able to necessarily read all of them but it doesn't take much like having a number of USB-disk/media interface adapters around.
Relevant stuff is either on Github or Codeberg for dev stuff and on a openCloud Instance for other files. openCloud gets backuped daily. If I ever need to reinstall my computer(s), I need to reinstall tools mostly and sync everything again.
Oh and as I just read it in the comments: I also have a parachute backup for images, iCloud stuff etc.
I just have a cron job running a simple bash script on all my machines (Linux, macOS) that compressess all my personal files (mainly configs and docs) on a daily basis. It then uploads it to a local NAS (just two USB sticks connected to a Raspberry Pi; might upgrade to a proper homelab at some stage). This is in turn backed up to Filen (Germany based). The backups include 30 daily backups + 12 monthly backups.
As for system-level backups, I just use btrfs automatic snapshots (via Snapper).
Mac: I use Parachute Backup to keep a local copy of my iCloud files and photos on an external drive. Backblaze backs the external drive and all local working files (roughly 16TB altogether) up for ~$100/year.
I'm not nearly as particular with my OS backups as I used to be. For instance Desktop personalization is minimal. I've used too many computers over the years to maintain much configuration beyond a small number of dot-files. Hobby code goes in Github/codeberg.org and some kind of cloud sync for my daily driver.
Another thing that ended up happening naturally is that I keep hard drives of old computers when I upgrade. They serve as point-in-time snapshots. I haven't made it a point to be able to necessarily read all of them but it doesn't take much like having a number of USB-disk/media interface adapters around.
You do need to modify it's default exclusions... I lost some movies I shot with my DSLR that way. 8(
As for system-level backups, I just use btrfs automatic snapshots (via Snapper).
- Daily snapraid backup of my NAS
- Once a month I save my desktop to another offline SSD
- Once a month I save important NAS files to an offline HDD