What is you backup tool of choice?

dustyData@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 124 points –

I don't mean system files, but your personal and work files. I have been using Mint for a few years, I use Timeshift for system backups, but archived my personal files by hand. This got me curious to see what other people use. When you daily drive Linux what are your preferred tools to keep backups? I have thousands of pictures, family movies, documents, personal PDFs, etc. that I don't want to lose. Some are cloud backed but rather haphazardly. I would like to use a more systematic approach and use a tool that is user friendly and easy to setup and program.

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Syncthing. I don't want to invest into a NAS and put some load into my already greedy power bill, so I chose something decentralized. Syncthing really just works like Torrent but for your personal files: Whatever happens on the computer, also does on the phone, and on the laptop. Each have about 1TB of space and 3 times redundancy? Hell yea buddy dig in.

But that's not really backup, is it? It just synchronizes folders.

Yes but it is a automated backup solution if you want it to. I just put important stuff in the Syncthing folder and rest assured its also on the phone incase the computers SSD caughs fire.

I think you are confusing synchronizing with backup. If you delete a file in your Syncthing folder and the deletion gets synchronized, that file is lost. If you do the same in a folder backed up by, say, Borg, you can roll back the deletion and restore the file.

I may be wrong about Syncthing, though. I haven't used it yet, but will probably use it in the future. Just not for backup :)

This is true if you leave it at defaults but I make use of file versioning. When you flick that one on, files that are otherwise replaced or deleted will actually move to a offline .stversions folder. That is very vital I must say in case a host catches some encryptor malware eheh

I didn't know that was a possibility. Still, it seem kind of not really what Syncthing is intended for. I mean, they even state it in their FAQ:

No. Syncthing is not a great backup application because all changes to your files (modifications, deletions, etc.) will be propagated to all your devices. You can enable versioning, but we encourage you to use other tools to keep your data safe from your (or our) mistakes.

I just found out about syncthing yesterday and it really is superb, it's so easy to use even crossplatform. unison is another syncing tool that I like, I find it better for bidirectional syncing