How should I do backups?
I have a server running Debian with 24 TB of storage. I would ideally like to back up all of it, though much of it is torrents, so only the ones with low seeders really need backed up. I know about the 321 rule but it sounds like it would be expensive. What do you do for backups? Also if anyone uses tape drives for backups I am kinda curious about that potentially for offsite backups in a safe deposit box or something.
TLDR: title.
Edit: You have mentioned borg and rsync, and while borg looks good, I want to go with rsync as it seems to be more actively maintained. I would like to also have my backups encrypted, but rsync doesn't seem to have that built in. Does anyone know what to do for encrypted backups?
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The software borgbackup does some insane compression.
It is more effective if you backup multiple machines tbh (my 3 linux computers with ~600gb used each get compressed down to a single ~350gb backup, because most of the files are the same programs and data over and over again)
But it might do a decent enough job in your case.
So one of the solutions might be getting a NAS and setting up borgbackup.
You could also get a second one and put it in your parents or best friends home for an offsite backup.
That way you don't have to buy as large of a drive capacity, but will only have fixed costst (+electricity) instead of ongoing costs for some rented server storage.
I guess that would be about 400$ per such a device, if you get a used office pc and buy new drives for it.
Tape seems to be about half the price per TB, but then you need special reader/writer for it, which are usually connected via SAS and are FUCKING EXPENSIVE (over 4000$ as far as I can see).
It only outscales HDDs in price after like ~600TB
How do you handle the cache invalidation issue with Borg when backing up multiple systems to one repo? For me if I access a Borg repository from multiple computers (and write from each) it has to rebuild the cache each time which can take a long time.
I seperate them by archive name prefix and never had the issue you describe.
Edit: it seems I just never noticed it, but the docu suggest you're right. Now I am confused myself lol.
https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#can-i-backup-from-multiple-servers-into-a-single-repository
big reason why i switched to kopia, borg just doesnt cut it anymore..
Easy: I make a Borg repository not only for a single server but for each directory. In this way if I need a file from nextcloud with an extremely generic name like "config" I only search in there and not sift between 100k similarly named files