bontmia VS BorgBackup

I use bontmia since forever, based on the same rsync feature (link-dest for creating hard links to the unmodified files since the last backup). It also supports backup rotation and I think it's quite solid/reliable after all these years: https://github.com/hcartiaux/bontmia

I maintain my incremental backup and handle the rotation with a shell script (bontmia) based on rsync with `--link-dest` (it creates hard links for unchanged files from the last backup). I've been using this on top of cryptsetup/luks/ext4 or xfs for > 10 years.

This is the tool I use: https://github.com/hcartiaux/bontmia

It's forked from an old project which is not online anymore, I've fixed a few bugs and cleaned the code over the years.

Hey, sorry it was hacked.

You mention rsync which can be fine. But there are tons of other solutions, many that will have snapshot features. I use borg backup, for instance. https://www.borgbackup.org/

Also, look into scriping your server setup with tools like Ansible or PyInfra. There is always the risk that bad things happen to servers, and when you want a new server it's great to be able to spin things up in a matter of minutes. Tools like these are profesional best practices these days.

In fact, if you have a scripted server setup and a server that doesn't collect data itself you may not even need backups. What is there to backup? Just spin up a new server with your scripts and carry on.

While Time Machine is convenient because it is integrated into macOS, it requires an external disk and lacks flexibility. borg has excellent compression rates but operates in single-threaded mode, making it slower than restic on fast local disks.

This happened to me and I finally ditched time machine for BorgBackup https://www.borgbackup.org/

Not as nice UI-wise, but at least it's stable

Combine regular PostgreSQL dumps with BorgBackup to create encrypted, deduplicated archives.

borgbackup developer here:

TL;DR: don't panic, all is good. :-)

Longer version:

- borg 1.x style “append-only” was removed, because it heavily depended on how the 1.x storage worked (it was a transactional log, always only appending PUT/DEL/COMMIT entries to segment files - except when compacting segments [then it also deleted segment files after appending their non-deleted entries to new segments])

- borg 2 storage (based on borgstore) does not work like that anymore (for good reasons), there is no “appending”. thus “—append-only” would be a misnomer.

- master branch (future borg 2 beta) has “borg serve —permissions=…” (and BORG_PERMISSIONS env var) so one can restrict permissions: “all”, “no-delete”, “write-only”, “read-only” offer more functionality than “append only” ever had. “no-delete” disallows data as well as data overwriting.

- restricting permissions in a store on a server requires server/store side enforced permission control. “borg serve” implements that (using the borgstore posixfs backend), but it could be also implemented by configuring a different kind of store accordingly (like some cloud storage). it’s hard to test that with all sorts of cloud storage providers though, so implementing it in the much easier to automatically test posixfs was also a motivation to add the permissions code.

Links:

- docs: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8906

I started using Nextcloud for file/contact/calendar syncing a few years, and have gradually moved most of my digital life into it. Documents and photos, but also scripts to automatically set some things up for me when I do a fresh install of Linux (I've been playing around with a few different distros lately). The only thing that doesn't live in Nextcloud are some old DVD rips, and that's mostly due to "haven't gotten around to it yet". Besides those, if it's not in Nextcloud, it's not something I care too much about losing if a disk were to fail.

My Nextcloud instance is then backed up to another drive on the same machine plus two off-site locations - an old server I still run at my parents' house, and and external HDD my friend let me plug in to his server. The on- and off-site backups are done using `borg` (https://www.borgbackup.org/), which does reduplication and encryption (with the keys backed up in 1Password).

I've been meaning to set up an automated restore on one of the offsite servers - a script to automatically unpack the latest backup, set up a fresh DB, and make things read-only - firstly to verify that the backups are functional and complete, but also as a backup in case my home server or home internet goes down. I know in _theory_ I've got everything I need in the backups to do a full restore, but I can't recall the last time I actually tried it out...