Selfhosted

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.

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...)

Assuming it is on: Daily

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

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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

No backup for my media. Only redundacy.

For my nextcloud data, anytime i made major changes.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Every hour, automatically

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

@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).

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?

Depends on the system but weekly at least