borgmatic VS snap-sync

- for important files, a separate box where I have borgmatic [1] in deduplication mode installed; this is updated once in a while

Just curious: Do you have any reason to believe that such a data corruption bug is likely in ZFS? It seems like saying that ext4 could have a bug and you should also store stuff on NTFS, just in case (which I think does not make sense..).

[1]: https://github.com/borgmatic-collective/borgmatic

Not really dumb. I do use them too but with Borgbackup on the top (since they support it natively).

I found Borgmatic ( https://torsion.org/borgmatic/ ) to be the best way to run my backups. It takes care of everything from pruning to verifying the checksum etc... and it integrates with some monitoring (like cronitor).

So Borgmatic + rsync.net is the best combo

For backups I use Borg myself. If you need a GUI, you can use Vorta or Pika. With borgmatic, there is also a wrapper that extends the range of functions of Borg.

Furthermore, Borgmatic is a wrapper for Borg that extends or improves the range of functions.

For those of you not familiar, borgmatic is a very convenient tool which runs as a wrapper around borg.

I recommend Borg and Borgmatic. Automated, easy to setup, capable of notifying you if anything happens, deduplication and compression makes backups smaller, etc.

To add to this, Borg backup can be a little daunting to configure. There is a wrapper script called Borgmatic that distills it down to a single yaml config file. There are also some cloud hosts like BorgBase and rsync.net with native Borg support.

- https://github.com/qubidt/snap-sync

You might be interested in snap-sync. It is a bash script which accomplishes btrfs backups using snapper under the hood. So no need to use btrbk (but you get all the same functionality).

I've been using snapper and snap-sync for automated snapshots and backups to an external drive. Recently, snap-sync is no longer maintained, and it may not be able to do some more things that I want to do, such as:

I was actively using snap-sync to back up my files to a local hard drive. Unfortunately, snap-sync will be retired soon.

I use snapper for snapshots and snap-sync for backing up said snapshots on an external drive.

Yeah, I use snapshots for backups using snap-sync, which is a convenience script around btrfs send. Personally I use it to back up onto an external HDD, but it can also do remote backups over SSH. I'm just not sure if remote backups are incremental or not.

On my laptop I make extensive use of openSUSE's snapper and the snap-sync script to sync to two external USB drives. Lastly, I wrote a script to clean/expire snapshots on the external volumes.

Snapshots aren't proper backups by themselves; they don't protect you from disk failure or the entire filesystem somehow being corrupted. It is possible to use them as backups; personally I use a command-line script called snap-sync to do this. This has the advantage of retaining the incremental nature of snapshots (though the incrementality will be on your backup media, so the first snapshot of a 100GB filesystem you put on your backup drive will take up 100GB of space), plus it integrates nicely with Snapper which is the snapshot utility I use.